Baze

I am really surprised they did not put the 787 on the app screen. They have ben touting it so much as the best of the fleet.

Critic

UA is concerned about igniting the iPhone's battery. </rimshot>

villox

So the holidays afforded me to get extensive use out of the UA and AA iPhone apps, and I gotta say we are really fortunate to have a pretty damn good app compared to AA. Can't comment on Delta. I was on UA, but my companion was on AA, so I was using both apps at the same time under similar conditions:

- The cards seem to be a bit overwhelming but once you get used to them you see why they're there and what use they have. They're easy to get rid of if you don't want them (just swipe up - this wasn't obvious to me at first).
- UA vastly outperforms AA when it comes to flight status. The ability to subscribe to push notifications for your flights as well as store them in cards is especially helpful, in particular if you're watching inbound or alternate flights. AA only lets you go to subscribe to text notifications.
- Speaking of flight status, the ability to follow a "breadcrumb" trail backwards ("where is this aircraft coming from") is only possible on AA.com, not the app, whereas you can do this easily with UA's.
- My flight was delayed and I was presented with alternative options, i.e. the IRROPS functionality, directly in the app. Very helpful.
- Of course, booking is only possible in the UA app, whereas AA just gives a window into their mobile site, which is difficult to use.

There is just so much functionality in the app and I think they head and shoulders above what AA offers.

footastic

i think the cards are super redundant.. all the default cards aside from status / club should be hidden.. then show the boarding pass cards after check-in .. not complaining new app is much better with changes than previous..

jackal

I can't help but agree. The same information in a MUCH easier to read form is present in the tray to the right. Why the cards? And then why do I have to swipe to the right 10 times to get to my UC and 1K cards? Highly inefficient.

And why is a card for only the immediately upcoming flight shown? When I'm sitting on a plane about to depart, I want to know about the next flight in my itinerary--when it will depart and what gate it'll be departing from so I know what I need to do once I get off the flight I'm on. But the card for the subsequent flight doesn't appear until sometime later after my first flight departs, leaving me (on flights without wifi, at least) in the dark about what my upcoming connection is going to look like unless I jump through a bunch of hoops to pull up my itinerary and try to pull up my flight status from that.

What I don't get is why do I need to specifically pull up all of my flights in my reservations and individually subscribe to notifications?

I should automatically be subscribed to push notifications for all flights I am on.

For that matter, I should receive a push notification when boarding starts and when my group is called.

It'd be nice if UA's back-end systems could accurately estimate actual departure times. It makes UA look somewhat incompetent when they predict a departure time of 8:40pm but when you tap "Where is this aircraft coming from?", it shows the previous flight is estimated to arrive at 8:41pm. (Real example from one I was tracking yesterday.)

In my limited testing, Delta doesn't have this issue. If a flight ETA is updated, then their Delta Nervous System is smart enough to then update the subsequent flight in real-time. The whole right-hand-doesn't-know-what-the-left-hand-is-doing thing that UA suffers from is annoyingly inefficient in modern times which demand quick analyses and quick responses.

demosthenes1

I think I'm on my first trip since the app update, and I'm running into some issues.

It used to be that I could scan any boarding pass off my iPhone and be accepted into the UC. This time, a passbook boarding pass didn't work, but it did work to scan the image of the UC card from app.

Usually, when my BPs are in passbook and I'm within three hours (or whatever it is) of flight time, I can access the BP from the home screen. On my last flight of a trip, it didn't show up. Still in passbook, though.

Speaking of that last boarding pass, the card shows up in the app, but shows gate as "not yet assigned", when everywhere else I can find the gate.

CApreppie

An update to the iOS app came out today. They added Timetable back into the app - that was one of my big complaints from the start. I do like they have an easy way to click days forward in the week from the results screen. I still don't think the navigation is very elegant or intuitive though in general.

And yes, it was surprising they didn't choose a 787 photo. But then again - people make dumb marketing decisions at United so it shouldn't be a surprise.

cblaisd

Still quite happy with 1.0.31; see no reason to update until/unless there is some crucial functionality that a new version has that the tried-and-true one lacks.

Mike Jacoubowsky

Maybe somebody recognizes that they've dumbed down the 787 so much that further marketing exceeds their ability to hide what they've done to it (dense seat configuration that turns it into another bus in the sky). Makes more sense to stick to what people are familiar with rather than risk a polarizing disappointment... that sudden realization that, wow, it's all just words & pretty pictures.

Say Vandelay

Noticed the date (a correct one) is back on the membership card in the app. I was hoping to be Plat thru 1/15 as the previous version said, but now I'm counting the days until I drop to Gold.

jackal

No date here I pulled down and made sure it was refreshed, too.

weirdlyndon

Date is back on mine. Showing card expires 1/2014

theise

Same here.

demkr

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_0_4 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11B554a Safari/9537.53)

Mine has 1/14 even though I'm 1K through 1/15. Glad I got credentials through the mail.sure Hope no status snafus come 2/1.

goalie

1/2014 is showing for me again as well