Originally Posted by
reeg2
Let's be honest, all of AA's IT infrastructure is due an upgrade.
I'll take Sabre over SHARES any day of the week.
That said, AA's app is lacking compared to UA's, but it is improving. I'm sure some of this has to do with the fact that this probably wasn't a high priority while the major IT systems were being merged. US's app improved a good bit and I'd hope that they'd take the best of both of those apps to improve AA's.
Also keep in mind that UA's systems have been merged for 4 years now, so they've had more time to focus on the mobile app. UA's website is also more usable than it was back in the day too (though many still refer to it as .bomb).
I get annoyed as well that I get booted out to the web version to do things like book tickets and stuff. However, the app's also come a long way since then, and app updates (at least on Android) have been happening about once a month.
To the OP's other comments:
Of the many inferior things about AA compared to UA (like the lack of Main Extra seats on all the old US Scare Airbuses), the absolute worst is the atrocious moble app. The United app is so good, I can almost instantly tell seat loading, status of incoming flights, you name it. The AA app is so bad, the formatting doesn't even work, the info is almost always wrong, it is slow to load, you cannot tell anything about upgrade situation, etc. How can two competing companies have such a gap? The AA website is also pretty bad too, but not as horrible as the mobile app.
The US A319s are being refitted. That takes time. Also remember that it was quite awhile before E+ showed up on the PMCO planes.
I can't say I've ever had formatting problems. This may the platform you're using, and can be affected by how the phone scales the resolution. Some phones are better than others.
However, the worst is the problem I have seen twice in the last week. Get all the way up to the TSA Precheck desk, and the TSA scanner wont read the bar code. I get the three beeps, so it recognizes me as eligible for Precheck, but won't recognize the bar code. I have to then go back and get a paper ticket. (for grins, I boarded that flight with the mobile app, so the problem seems to be between AA and the TSA, not the barcode itself)
As others have mentioned, this can be affected by the screen's brightness, and isn't necessarily a fault of the app itself. I haven't had any problems with AA BPs on my phone. However, I often have problems with scanning a local convenience store chain's coupon barcodes on my phone at least 50% of the time at normal brightness. Cranking up the brightness temporarily has always resolved the issue for me.
So today I call the AA help desk, the nice lady says this is a widespread problem and they are working on it. She advise me to NOT use the mobile app for now, to print all tickets for now. She also said they have a huge number of complaints with the sorry state of both the mobile app and the website, and are trying their hardest to catch up to United.
While I don't doubt she said that, AA agents aren't always the most knowledgeable, with varying degrees of knowledge and truth depending on who you get (this is true at UA as well). Unless that actually came from someone at the web department, I'd take it with a grain of salt.
The good news on Android anyway, most of the time I can accomplish what I need thru the widget so I don't have to go all the way in to the app a lot of times.