Originally Posted by
canadiancow
If you click the "change" button, it loads the regular website where you can change seats.
Nothing native yet, but that "change" button can take you there too.
I can see my equipment on almost every segment segment (SA JNB-CPT flight, a few UA SFO<->LAX flights) in all my trips.
Compared to US airlines, it doesn't have nearly as many features. Compared to the rest of the world, it's pretty good. Most of the apps I'm looking at for other Amadeus-based airlines what one might call a "webview app". It's technically an app, but it just loads the website.
For most features right now, AC's app is a "webview app". Anything that's accessed through the "change" button. Or most of the check-in experience.
But it's also a much better platform than the vast majority of non-US airline apps, and certainly better than the previous one.
I can't tell you everything that's coming next. But I do know that more stuff that's currently behind a webview is going to move into a much better native experience.
I have 8 years of full-time experience building mobile apps. The flight pass app excited me, and this app excites me. The old app had no hope of ever gaining useful features with a good user experience. This one does.
You statements summarily dismiss valid criticism of the abomination of an "application" issued by Air Canada, yet your comments do not recognize that the application did not meet the user's basic needs. The majority of Air Canada's customers/passengers' flights involve Air Canada. These passengers require access to a functional, useful website for their Air Canada related travel. They did not book a ticket on Air China or Air Koryo etc. so those websites failings have no relevance even if to offer an opportunity to proclaim that the AC app isn't so bad in comparison.
Maybe Air Canada intends to improve its application, and maybe it will deliver some additional options, but we are in the present and must deal with what is actually available. Unfortunately, what Air Canada offers is an abject and absolute failure in every sense of the term. The application does not meet the needs of its users. One can read the comments of users to see that the overall consensus is that the application is awful. This is all that matters: The USERS hate the application. The airline and its programmers/systems managers or whatever term one wishes to call this collection of incompetents did not provide a useful, helpful application. Air Canada should issue an apology to its customers and should contract with competent personnel to obtain an effective application. It seems that the only reason there is an application is to allow AC to claim that it has an application.
The grand benefits of webview are irrelevant to the immediate needs of the application users. We need options and useful features NOW, not in 6 months, not next year, but NOW. Why would someone like me , a simple AC user ,who recently made the mistake of purchasing a ticket from Air Canada that incorporated a few air carrier segments be so concerned? Well it starts with having AC cancel a connecting AC segment while I was in the air and getting an sms that says to use its app to obtain additional info. Try landing in a large US airport and literally spending hours being sent from one desk to another with personnel telling you to call the airline or to make changes online, with no one answering the telephone call, and a useless Air Canada phone app and equally ineffective website. This is why access to a reliable, effective application is so very important. Even though some of us do fly in J, often we cannot access a concierge or AC doesn't make one available or due to one flight's issue, the airline goes into service meltdown at an airport because the agents can't process the 150+ pax.
One can discuss the niceties of web apps and the capabilities of websites vs phone applications, however none of that matters when what is needed is access to a mobile telephone application that can help a customer in need. In an ideal world, Air Canada would be compelled to provide phone service, i.e. answer the telephone. It is therefore a reasonable expectation of consumers that the airline offer an application that will address the airline's refusal to provide basic call center service. The airline obviously doesn't care, otherwise it would have offered something helpful long ago.