FlightAware Flight Tracker 9+

We got from MIA to FAI in one day thanks to Flight Aware!

We had a long 3 segment flight from MIA to FAI through DTW and SEA. We only made it through this app. I used it to track all our flights plus the inbound flights that had our planes as we had a tight connection in DTW. Using notifications it let me know all the statuses and told me before Delta did of delays. Our initial flight had a 2 hour weather related ground stop while we were sitting on it and we would miss our connection in DTW except Flight Aware kept updating me that our DTW-SEA flight kept getting pushed back due to delays so when we got there we made the flight as it got pushed back a few more times due to mechanical issues with the jetway. Except we would miss out SEA-FAI connection! Once again Flight Aware informed me before Delta of delays with our SEA-FAI flight and we ended up making it! Without Flight Aware I might have wrongly accepted Delta’s offers to reschedule a day later and would have missed parts of our scheduled events in Fairbanks!

All good except for the update nag screen

Great app overall, but it has one incredibly annoying, erm, “feature” that I need to vent about. The app checks the App Store for updates at startup and, if an update is found, displays a nag screen about the update that you have to click through before proceeding, disrupting your workflow.

For myself and the other 99% of iOS users who have Automatic Updates turned on for the very fact that we don’t want to—and shouldn’t have to, quite frankly—ever consciously think about updating apps and would rather have the OS do it for us automatically in the background at night, this manual update reminder is unnecessary and intrusive. None of my other apps are this OCD about updates. Relax already, the OS will update your app for us eventually.

And, by the way, since the app apparently uses the App Store’s staged rollout option, whereby updates can take up to 7 days to reach 100% of users—to wit, I was only just today (Feb 22) auto updated to the Feb 15 release—displaying the update nag notice the instant the app is released makes this practice even more logic defying. If you insist on keeping this update screen, fine, but at least wait 8 days after the update is released to the App Store so that it is only seen by those who don’t use auto app updates.

won’t set up notifications

UPDATE: I waited a bit and before I deleted the app, I tried it one more time - the issue seems to have been fixed and the app is working as advertised. I actually got responses from the developer regarding this, which I found impressive and surprising. Changing my rating from one star to 5.

PREVIOUS REVIEW: app worked fine for awhile, but suddenly, it will not allow me to set up notifications for flights. When I try to set a notification for a flight, I get a message that “email to friends for single day only” (or something similar). I don’t have emails to friends set up in my settings, so the error message makes no sense to me. I have settings to just email to me to track flights I want to meet. I tried turning off even emails to me to reset to “send to my device”, but I still get the error message.

Flight Tracker is a much more reliable app, and it has become my go-to app for tracking flights I need to meet. This one just doesn’t work anymore.

Respuesta del desarrollador ,

***Update: This has been fixed as of yesterday afternoon (5/23). Again, sorry for the inconvenience.

Hi Fran70809, Thanks for letting us know about the issue you found. We're working to address it and there should be a fix in the next few days. Sorry for the inconvenience.