Dang, I also don't want them to change the app, it's fine the way it is, and I'm surprised many of us feel the same. I wonder how we can get this feedback to that United Exec? Anyone want to attend that event and pull up this Flyertalk thread for them? LOL.
I really think they should be asking their most frequent flyers about input on the app. I would be surprised if they just designed this themselves without any input from the customer, especially 1K-ers and GS.
In the meantime, I am going to turn off automatic app updates on my iPhone so that I can keep the "old version" for as long as possible, once they roll out the new one. Hopefully I can still use the old version too.