Sundance Film Festival 2025 4+

This app would not work unless you were in strong wifi and the Sundance WiFi could not handle it. It kept telling me that I had no internet even though I was connected. It also wouldn’t work with WiFi off and just using data. And even if i could get it up, it just kept crashing after a few secs. So unfortunately I could not use it, which was extremely frustrating as I wanted to get on the waitlist a couple times and could not!

The app experience continues to be a struggle at Sundance. Rather than creating new apps each year, put the energy into fixing this one. Problems this year:
- no linking of waitlists, which makes waitlisting a movie very problematic. The vast majority of attendees do not go alone. Without the linking of accounts, this means it’s far more likely that one or both cannot get in
- it shouldn’t be so hard to find what screenings have tickets available. Display whether there are tickets in the schedule
- consider using notifications to indicate tickets available if I have shows or screenings that I’ve favorited. I spend SO much time refreshing and checking to see if tix are available. Such a waste of time.
- fix the performance issues during the event! Maybe the burden on the app is so high due to the poor design and inability to easily see when tix are available, but the app often is far too slow during the festival

Very dissatisfied with the app experience this year. First, the movies weren’t populating, only the programming like the morning meditations, panels, and all of the other experiences other than the movies were showing in the schedule. I kept navigating around trying to find out the why, navigated back and somehow the movies were there. I have no idea how. But spent an hour on that part.

Now the waitlist process is presenting a problem. I tried to waitlist three movies to see with my partner. In years past, we were able to link our accounts and get on a waitlist in sequential order. This year, I tried to join a waitlist and it asks if I want to add a companion. I did but our waitlist order was 30-50 spots apart. I assume when I first clicked to join the waitlist that it snagged my spot and while it was asking if I wanted to add a companion it kept accepting other people who got in line between us. Not a great system. What’s the point of the process like that if we’re going to be 50 spots apart? From past experience, there’s no way both of us would make it in.

Lastly, for the third movie we wanted to see today via the waitlist, the waitlist didn’t show up on my app until 3 minutes after it opened. We ended up being in spots 100 and 149.

This is really disappointing. These are basic functionalities of an app for an event like this and they all broke down.