I’ve been following runners on the official NYC Marathon app for years now - this is by far the worst version. I searched ahead of time for my runners to follow. 1. The app didn’t list their anticipated start times in the followed runners’ info section. 2. The app kept deleting my saved runners and replacing them with random people. 3. During the race when I was trying to find my runners, it wouldn’t let me re-add them - it just kept giving error messages. 4. The few times I could see my 2 runners listed, the map loaded so slowly I couldn’t actually see their location. 5. It didn’t seem like the search worked well, and the ability to find runners based on run club seemed like it wasn’t working. Overall, it was absolutely worthless. Please bring back an old version. Sure, they would lag a teeny bit when everyone was using it at once to track all the runners, but the features and functionality were there 95% of the time and you at least could know in real time if your runner was coming or had already passed you. This year’s version was totally useless.

This (2025) is my fourth year spectating for the marathon. This was by far the absolute worst year for tracking runners/using this app. They should honestly just do away with pretending to offer any app functionality, since it was unusable. The app did not load fully at any point during the 5+ hours we were watching. It dropped all of my follows, during the full time of the race, except for two different male marathon professions for both my friend and I. It randomly followed I it If this is the work of Tata (I sure hope not) they are doing a terrible job. The app made the experience extraordinarily frustrating and we instead resorted to using the NYT article on the race, a screenshot of the route, and hopes and prayers. NYRR, do better next year.

It was extremely laggy, tried to track my friends and they would not recognize them the first time I typed it in. It was only until the third time I typed it in that it would pick up people‘s names. When I finally got my friends in the tracker, it was showing like their projected finish all the way to the end like they had already finishedwhen I close the app and came back to it, but it lost all the names that I had put in there and it kept having me track this random person and that’s the only person I got notifications from when they crossed the finish line and when they exited the park, the absolute worst app ever the Chicago app is far superior as well as Boston.

There’s 1 day all year this app needs to work. 364 days to prep, and still a colossal failure. I wasn’t able to track friends, family, or use the app at all. This was also true for every person I know. Besides that, why did you have me follow all these celebrities I care nothing about? I really would have preferred not to, and the way you can “track” vs “follow” people was horrible too. People I was “following” didn’t show up on the map because I didn’t “track” them, and instead I was looking at celebrities I had never heard of. What horrible UI. Keep it simple and do better. I’d give 0 stars if I could for not working at all the day millions were counting on you.