BuyNothing Ratings and Reviews

I love buy nothing, whenever I’m declutterring I try to move as much stuff through it as I can instead of just trashing or unloading to goodwill. I will continue to use it and continue to support as much as I can. Obviously this is not a for-profit business and it’s expensive and time-consuming to develop a well-functioning app, but I wish the devs would SUPER PRIORITIZE fixing the messaging system. Please add a notification sound!! Please make the background process work better so notifications come through consistently!! The number of times I’ve kept people waiting because they were outside my apartment building and I didn’t realize is frustrating, and it’s always because I didn’t get notified of their message

I never write reviews because most of the time an app doesn’t warrant me enough to do so; however, I really do love this app and the concept and I want to see the developers follow through on what it means to have community. I’ve gotten to meet some really wonderful people, but god the constant crashing, loading circle of doom, freezing, being forced to log in only to be logged out some time after, and so forth—complete bootycheeks. I’ve never wanted to bang my head against a wall so much until I came across this app. And I know I’m not the only one, so, whatever the developers are doing, please, I beg of you: fix this app. Don’t disappoint the good people that utilize this tool by skipping out on quality.

Also, a “repost” function would be incredibly useful so people don’t have to copy and paste a whole new post. Especially for those who have multiple items, it’s time consuming and could be much quicker.

I’d really love to change this rating, so I hope you’re reading this and taking it into consideration. It really is a great app, but my patience is wearing thin from how much it has persisted.

This app is great for getting rid of things in my house that no longer serve any purpose. I feel much more comfortable knowing that:

1.) All these things are free. People give and receive on a basis of pure want and need. Nothing is motivated by profit.

2.) Nothing is being wasted. I’m not donating clothes to goodwill for them to exploit disabled people for profit, these things aren’t going to a dump… everything will continue to be used until the absolute last moment!

I would appreciate if the messaging and commenting system were a bit snappier. I get stuck on random loading bits sometimes that are annoying. The inbox also glitches out and shows other people’s messages together.

Other than that, I want more people to use this!

Pro: It’s great to get rid of unused furniture and help others. Especially last minute when plans change. Cons: The app loads very poorly. Viewing this as a software engineer the loading times are unnecessarily slow and they need to fix their load times because it impacts user experience. As a client using the app, the load times and the lack of notifications at random times is annoying. I would have uninstalled the app for this. This happened last night were a person was messaging me and I never saw or received a notification. Only reason I knew because I thought it was odd and looked at the app to see a bunch of messages but no notifications came thru. I know it wasn’t my phone because other notifications from other apps showed fine. This is why I rated the app 2 stars instead of 5. When the fix the errors I’ll change it.

I love BuyNothing and the entire idea behind it. I’ve found some great stuff and I’ve been able to give away things to people who are always appreciative.

However, the app itself does not work well. It logs me out constantly and does not give me notification while I’m logged out. Whenever I give a gift I have to be constantly checking the app to make sure I don’t make someone wait outside for 30 minutes. I’ve also had it log me out and not let me back in for an extended period of time.

If the issue of being logged out could be fixed, I would use this app more often. It’s just too inconvenient to be on it all the time to make sure it’s working.

i love engaging with the buy nothing community, but it would be nice if the app was consistently functional. sometimes i get randomly booted in the middle of using the app and have to log back in (which usually doesn’t work even with the correct password and the “reset password” link takes like 24 hours to send). often the app will just sit and load for ages, eventually crashing, and you just have to try again in a half hour. in messages, it very regularly shows the wrong name (e.g. a conversation with person A shows the name of person B at the top). i very rarely have an interaction with the app that doesn’t end in me wanting to throw my phone across the room, which is a real bummer because this is such an important community to stay connected with.

Please invest in this, core team -- get better servers or something... Such a promising idea with a good community, but the single worst user experience of any app I have ever used. Astonishingly bad; see the other reviews. Logs you out randomly, crashes, super laggy and unreliable messaging, messages that were marked as Seen get switched randomly back to Unseen, slowwwwwwww to load and render.

There's a ton of back and forth to do with people in negotiating item pickup. Messaging just cannot be this bad, for this to work.

If you're moving there can be 10 or 20 items going at once. each with multiple threads. It's just agonizing to use as it is.

Love the Buy Nothing community initiative as I love knowing my stuff will be used by others. Since I’m not on Facebook, I hated missing out on Buy Nothing. That said, this app is incredibly frustrating - it hangs up or crashes, is ridiculously slow, often doesn’t notify you of messages, and the feels like the user experience is an afterthought (let me reshare vs doing a new post, for example). Also, it was great on FB to have people somewhat “screened” in terms of location which seems to be missing here.

I want more people to use this and join the BN commmunity, but the app is not helping.

For whatever reason it takes forever to load. I stay logged in, but more often than not the log in screen comes up on opening the app and will just hang there until I close it out of frustration.
More recently, it takes about 3 attempts for any posts or replies to messages/comments to actually go through. I’ll type something up and press send or post, only for what I’ve typed out to disappear.

I’m sticking to the free section of Craigslist, and using trash nothing and freecycle for posting from now on.

This is my favorite app to give things away and ask for things. I love that it is neighborhood based and encourages sustainability and community.

I’m not a Facebook user and love that this app allows me to engage with my neighborhood in a meaningful way without having to join a group.

I’m always pleasantly surprised what is being gifted in my neighborhood and love responding to asks when I have the items needed.