Alpaca: Your Ravelry Companion 9+

This is one of my favorite apps on my phone and I definitely spend way too much time perusing and collecting patterns using it. I’ve never had any issues with it before this week, but now whenever I try to click a link within a pattern to another pattern (e.g., I clicked the “grains of good sweater” that was linked within the “grains headband”), it brings me to a pattern called “Library”, which is not at all related (by designer, pattern name, type, etc). Multiple times this has happened on multiple different patterns, always bringing me to the “library” pattern, which is for a sweater vest that, while I’m sure is lovely, I have no intention of making or adding to my pattern collection.

I’ve looked to see if there are app updates (there aren’t) and tried restarting my phone to determine if it’s an issue with my device (it isn’t), all to no avail. My current theory is the designer of the “Library” sweater vest has hacked the app in a subtle way to get her vest pattern out there to the masses haha. But in all seriousness, that glitch aside, this is a great app. If they can fix that bug I will change my rating to 5 stars.

Okay, so I’ve been using Ravit instead of Ravelry’s mobile site, and it’s really come a long way in the last few months, but it’s still kind of disappointing. So, I was thrilled when I discovered Alpaca, because it seemed like it might have everything that Ravit lacked. The one thing that’s really irritating is that the “saved search parameters” don’t actually stay saved. They’re reset every time I reopen the app. I don’t want to have to re-enter my search parameters every time I want to look for something in the app. Hopefully this will be addressed in the next update, because I really like Alpaca, and I think it’s got a ton of potential.
I also love that you can see and leave comments on other user’s projects from the app, but I wish that I could “favorite” projects from the app as well. You guys would have Ravit best hands down if those features were available.

I love how this app makes Ravelry more easy to use on my phone. It’s clean, fresh, and fast. It’s easy to use and has most of the functionality of the full site. I’m quite impressed!

I actually downloaded the app primarily to work on my projects. I often take wip photos on my phone and uploading them to Ravelry was a time consuming process. This app is really helpful for editing and uploading pictures to existing projects. I’d really like the ability to add new projects directly from the app and to filter my projects within the notebook section (my oldest finished ones are showing first), but I can workaround that with my laptop.

Overall, I’m quite happy with this app. Thank you for making it available!