Edfringe 12+

This app only narrowly beats using the website for buying tickets. The most useful thing it does is to let you add shows to the planner before you’ve decided if you want to buy tickets. But this feature is hidden behind the ‘dates’ tab on an event. Your tickets and saved shows are listed in the planner, but you can’t get back to the show description and details from there, and so you have to manually search for it if you want to go back to it. The search function is less powerful than the website’s search (which lets you search by genre AND category). The app continually interrupts you with a pop up to tell you you’re off-line and then another one to tell you’re back online — even when you’re online. Apple Pay is broken, but it won’t use card details I’ve stored in my phone either. I’ve had to manually enter card details each time I’ve bought tickets. Why did they go all the way to Australia to find people to build an app this bad

The app looks good, very clean except for the fact it does not respect my dark mode setting. Now if that was the end of it I wouldn’t feel the need to give it one star or write a review. The app is completely unusable without on internet connection, something that in a city like Edinburgh during a busy event like fringe is surprisingly hard to find. Now I understand some things like buying tickets is impossible to do without a connection, but at the very least I should be able to browse shows and see both even locations and times from a local cache of data downloaded with the app and refreshed when a stable connection is made. But no you had to throw up a full screen you appear to be offline message and keep my from reading the show description or try to find the location of the venue so I can get directions in maps. This “feature” renders the app completely unusable and incredibly infuriating. The website is more reliable and has more features than the app especially show reviews. Which completely renders the app pointless.

Where to begin… Fundamentally, the design is good. However, the venue map does not work as it does on the Edfringe website - it fails to identify venue numbers until you have clicked on them - forcing you to laboriously search the blank dots on the map. Another issue is that clicking on shows in your planner only brings up the options to delete them or buy tickets for them - rather than linking back to the show information. There is also, no obvious way to review a show through the app - that needs to wait until you are back at home on your desktop and forgotten all about the show… There are other annoying quirks, but the worst thing is the fragility of the app - it fails if you have anything less than a perfect high-speed mobile connection - like when you are actually in a building such as a Fringe venue!