The app promises a lot of features that don’t actually work. Maybe my daughters’ camp just doesn’t use those features. I don’t know. All I know is that I spent $30 to send my daughters 6 messages. Maybe a 7th will get through. Again, I don’t know. I was never informed of a cut-off for sending messages but when I tried to send one at 7:03am a message popped up that Bunk1 messaging ended at 7am today even though my daughters’ camp continues until tomorrow at noon. I’m annoyed because I still had a dozen credits left. My Bunk1 also had no newsletters and no pictures were ever posted. The promise of pictures and updates were the whole reason I signed up. And the preview material makes it sound like campers will be able to write you back but that was not really an option either for my campers. Overall a frustrating experience - the app took entirely too long to download and had an exorbitant cost for the amount of communication actually facilitated.

Any good app can provide a service. But great apps actually solve a problem. I don't think this app solves any "real" problems. I was happy to be able to send a quick message to my 2 campers from my phone but that came at a price that did not seem to match the value. First, to send any message you have to buy credits. To send a simple message takes one credit. One credit cost $1. Ok, fair enough, I can see paying that. But, the minimum package of credits you can buy is six. Ok, $6... at this point I vow next year to get my letters stamped and mailed sooner. I reluctantly enter my credit card info knowing that I will use 3 (at best) of my six credits. This would be ok if I could spread the credits out over my 2 kids who are at the same camp... but no, I have to pay an extra $6!!! So $12 dollars total to basically send a couple of emails. As somebody who works in the tech industry, I am starting to feel a bit ripped off at this point. So I get ready to send my first message. 1 credit no problem .... but.... every little thing you want to add to it takes additional credits. For example adding a photo, 2 additional credits. Adding a border to your message (A BORDER FOR CRIPES SAKES!!!!) an additional credit. So, I go to send my first photoless, borderless message and get to the submit page and what am I presented with? A $1.34 handling fee!!!!! ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?!?!?! For what, pray tell, do you need a handling fee? At this point I am perturbed and my wife has to remind me "just think how happy our kids will be to receive our messages." To which I respond "I hope they don’t want additional credits for using emojis."The only way I could see any redeeming value to my experience with this app is that the camp gets a small cut some of that $6 and handling fee. If not, then this app will be deleted and not used again when the kiddos get back from camp. App is worth 3 stars but giving it 2 to send my message.

First, let me state that the app is very good, I gave it 4 stars. Being able to send customized Bunk Notes to my children (with a photo, or sports scores, or a Suduko) and receive them back from them is such a relief! Last year they said they LOVED getting our Bunk Notes. And sending replies to us gave them a quick way to ask us to send them things they forgot or needed. Being able to see (and download) photos of them is wonderful! However, so far this year (2020) finding the photos has been difficult. Which is why I am giving it 4 stars instead of 5.This morning I received a Notification that each of my campers had new photos. Yeah! Unfortunately I couldn’t find them anywhere. Clicking on those messages in Notifications and clicking on the Gallery takes me to a page that has “No Photos Yet”, as does clicking on my campers mini photos at the top of the main pages. Why does it say “No Photos Yet” when there are photos?To find the photos I ended up clicking on every single link in the app before clicking on the little square next to the heart in the upper right corner. A frustrating waste of time.My wife had received the same notifications on her IPhone, and clicking on the messages took her to the photos. She was asked to confirm that they were our campers, which she did. Perhaps confirming them breaks the link to those photos? If so, I suggest you fix that so it doesn’t break the link. Sometimes it’s easier to find individual photos thru the Notification.Lastly, if you can increase the type, number and variety of things (there is only 1 suduko puzzle, no other puzzles, there aren’t any jokes or funny sayings) you can include in the Bunk Notes, that would be great!

The app is a must-use if it’s the system of choice of the camp, and so the developer should pay special attention to some basic functions of an app, such as rotating so it can be used with a keyboard in landscape mode. The art in the borders is childish, so if you’re the parent of a pre-teen or teen camper, the borders are not worth paying a credit for. Including photos is a nice touch as is a Sudoku puzzle. Why isn’t there there the ability to include a signature, it’s on an iPad after all. Or expand functionality so that you can include more than one photo in a grid. Face recognition works well, but isn’t reliable enough not to have to have you go through camp photos anyway. I’ve had campers for 5+ years and used Bunk1 but haven’t seen much innovation at all. Time for a refresh.

What a kluge-fest! There are millions of free apps that are far more capable and reliable. It's slow, but that's the least of its flaws. This app crashes regularly when resumed from sleep, but not until you push Send. Then *poof* it's gone and it doesn't save anything when it crashes, so your message is history. Inexcusably, the text entry screen doesn't scroll (really!) so you can write maybe 5 or 6 little lines of text on your note before your typing disappears from view and you can no longer check or edit it. This is a serious flaw, more so given the proclivity of iPhones to autocorrect.If this was a free app acknowledged to be in beta testing, maybe it wouldn't seem so awful, but paying $5 for the app to use a service I'm already paying for?! and then have it be essentially non-functional?! If I could give it negative 1 stars, I would. Don't waste your money on this piece of junk, stick with the Bunk 1 website.UPDATE: After complaining bluntly to them through the contact us link on the web site, I actually got a responsive email that thanked us for the feedback and credited us the cost of the app (thank you!) plus a couple of extra Bunk 1 credits (pretty useless, but at least a gesture). Kudos to them for responsive customer service.

The only very small value in this app is the ease of sending bunk notes, but this can done just as easy by logging onto the camp website. From what I read on the Camp Liognier website there is only one photographer so I recognize our child wouldn’t likely be in many pictures. However, I find it difficult to understand how most of the pictures of all the campers are either out of focus, not zoomed it appropriately, or taken from bizzare angles. So far almost every picture taken of our child is of his back. This makes the facial recognition useless. In addition there are zero Activity or Newsletter updates which make these completely useless as well. The designers should be ashamed of themselves for developing such a poor app