Homey - Chores and Allowance 4+

It works

I've been using Homey for a few weeks now, and it's becoming one of my favourite apps. I do wish I could pick and choose which notifications I want to get (right now it's either on or off), with 5 kids notifications can get a bit much. Even so, this has been the first app that got my kids doing chores consistently, and without me nagging. I have a few recommendations: 1. don't bother setting up a spending jar - how the jars work, it's much better to keep spending in the "total money" and use jars for actual saving goals. 2. read the manual. I found it in the help section and it was a lifesaver. This app has more features than your usual chore app, and it can be a bit complicated to set things correctly. I thought the app was deleting chores, when in fact I had them set to multiple kids at once, and one kid always completed the one chore for all of them. 3. make sure your kids have just the permissions they need. I think the app could make this a bit more obvious, but I had all my kids set up as parents and there's no clue apart them being able to do everything (delete chores, add money to their wallets...). Lets just say they had a bit of fun with it. 4. This one if for the Homey team: MAKE TEXT BIGGER! I'm not getting any younger and some text is really small and white and hard to read, lol.

Love it…but serious glitches

This is a great concept, and we love the idea behind this app. It has truly helped our boys learn how to be responsible for their jobs around the house, and it’s great watching them learn about organization, time-management, and finance.

However, this app has several frustrating glitches. Things often take a ridiculously long time to load, and then error out rather than loading at all. We are frequently unable to make edits, create new jobs, and switch accounts. When these things happen, we can SOMETIMES close out the app and it works at that point but not always. In the last 20 minutes I’ve attempted to edit one of my son’s profile, add a daily goal, and edit a job. All of which failed after they timed out. For each of those three things the app loaded for several minutes before telling me there was an error. We may need to cancel our subscription, delete this app, and find something more reliable.

Very frustrating.

Developer Response ,

Hi there,

the past few weeks we were working hard on improving our server infrastructure to provide the best experience in terms of performance and reliability even in the busiest times. We apologize for the downtime caused by the infrastructure migration.

If there's anything else we can help with, please let us know at feedback@homeyapp.net

Best,
Homey team

Great Concept, Lacking Functionality

This app is a great concept, however there are some pretty significant issues. I have been using it with my daughter now for about 2 weeks and at first it seemed really promising, but as we use it it has become increasingly frustrating.
Firstly, if you want to use any really useful functions you have to pay for the app. $4.99/mo. Is a bit steep in my opinion. I'd rather give that money to my daughter for her allowance. First issue is the lack of ability to approve or disapprove completed chores. This is pretty basic and should be included. They claim that the fee for the app is to cover the cost of using the banking features. I do not need those features, but would still like to use the other features, like jars!!! Perhaps the developers could consider 2 subscription levels, with a cheaper price for those of us who do not need the banking features. I would gladly pay $2/month to use all of the other features.
Another annoying thing is the notifications. I am constantly getting notifications, but when I log into the app I see nothing. No notification link or section and nothing to indicate what the notification is for. Pretty annoying.
I am going to plug along for a little longer, but sadly feel that if the improvements I suggested don't happen I will have to move on to another app.