Canvas Student 4+

Prior to my universities switching to Canvas, I haven’t imagined an app would be so bad that removing it from my devices will be part of the graduation celebrations.

No split-screen multitasking. No drag and drop. Notifications lead me to home page instead of messages. And recently the app quits itself every day for my “updated language settings”.

This is a good compliment to Canvas Web as it allows iPhone and iPad users to access most of the features in the web version such as course announcements and grades.

The integration of the app with the filesystem is also appreciated—users can upload and download assignments directly from and to other apps installed on the device.

However, the app is incomplete. The Dashboard in the iOS/iPadOS version lacks the List View found in the web version, which I find beneficial as I can go directly to assignments or announcements without clicking through deeply nested sets of menus and enables me to see tasks to do in one screen.

There is also a lack of support for Dark Mode, which makes the app look like it does not integrate well with the rest of the operating system.

To improve, developers can add more features from the web client to the iOS/iPadOS version, bringing them on par with each other. Canvas iOS can also try to integrate more with the ecosystem such as implementing dark mode and synchronising notifications across different devices with Canvas installed.

Like I said in title, I do overall recommend it, there are just a few small flaws. The first one is that even when you keep the app running in the background, it has a tendency to ‘lose it’s place’ from what you were looking at and act like you’re reopening it. Nothing major, but it is kinda annoying. The second gripe is that the app just isn’t as good as the website which is annoying and it doesn’t seem like it would be too hard to improve it; the website more easily lets you know what you’ve got coming up, and the app can’t always properly display things that the website can.