Is the MDE phone app buggy?

[oceanmarina]

Hi all,

I have never had the MDE app on my phone (I do them all on my home PC). I thought I remember reading last year that it was very buggy and had messed up some fastpasses.

I am thinking of trying it for my trip next week but I wanted to check in with everyone here first.

Thanks for any feedback,
Marina

 

[gavsgirl]

I can't speak as of recently (I know they update things pretty frequently app-wise these days) but when we used it in September of last year it was awful. It messed up a dining reservation and some FP. They honored the error on the dining but unfortunately not the FPs! Hoping its better for use with our upcoming trip - it's a handy thing to have if it worked properly!

 

[RafikiTiki21]

If I had to make a change to FP for the next day, I went to our resort concierge to make the changes for fear of the edit FP workflow being too buggy. This was a solid workaround for me, but see what your experience is and don't be afraid to ask a CM for help for something that seems risky to your well-made plans!

 

[CAS239]

I've never had any issues with the app. It works great and does what it needs to do.

It's not buggy at all

 

[Corwin]

I've used the app on both my iPhone and my iPad, on our last two visits (August 2014 and July 2015). Overall, the app works very well. I've never lost a dining reservation or a Fastpass. I've successfully changed ADRs as well as Fastpasses on the fly using the app.

Every once in a while the app may hang up or crash, or I find that I have to log in again, but a quick relaunch of the app and/or logging in again has fixed it. Again, I've never lost an ADR or Fastpass.

 

[oceanmarina]

Thanks, anyone else care to weigh in?

 

[walker0829]

Used it exclusively last year in order to check dining reservations and even snagged a Crystal Palace reservation the afternoon before using the app. Never had any issues with it beyond that fact that it's so useful it drains my phone battery.

 

[Jon84]

Never any bugs that ruined any plans in December or April. Sure the odd thing not loading properly, but nothing they ruined plans

 

[AngiTN]

It used to be awful. But they have made major changes to it over the past few months. It works pretty well now. There are actually a few things that are easier to do on the app than on the website. Change FP is one of those. One year ago I never thought I'd be saying that. The old interface didn't inform you when it replaced a FP or changed the time on you. It just did it, you never confirmed the change. They fixed that and it works great now.

 

[Lucius Best]

We had lots of problems with the app before and during our trip in April. 7 people on our trip, had to make numerous phone calls to Internet Help Desk in order to get all of our accounts linked properly (friend invites not being received, duplicates in friend list). All the CMs I spoke with on the phone were very helpful and able to resolve our issues. Didn't have any problems making FP+ reservations.

Once at WDW, had problems modifying FPs on the app. First day, booked a 4th FP at kiosk, tried to change it on the app, but it wasn't properly displaying which people were on the reservation. Later in trip noticed that sometimes additional FPs booked at kiosks did not show up on the app. At that point we had already decided that if we needed to modify something, we would go to a kiosk. Also saw weird display issues here and there, for example: app would say 7 people on a FP, but when select the FP, it would only display 2 or 3 names. There were also some screwiness with wait times. One day in Epcot, it was displaying both Epcot rides AND HS rides. One day at MK it was listing every ride as "closed" for several hours.

Besides the bugs and glitches and usability issues, it also drained the battery on my iPhone4S pretty quickly, seemed like it was using GPS heavily to know exactly where you were in the park. I was prepared for that and had purchased an external battery charger which I used most days.

 

[Cee]

I've never had a problem with it on either iPhone or iPad. It worked great.

 

[Polydweller]

Works great on our iPhones and iPads. Never lost a thing over a few trips now.

 

[DizzneyDi]

We found during our last trip in late January/early February that the app actually worked better on my barely-a-smartphone than it did on DS's all-the bells-and-whistles genius level smartphone! He sometimes couldn't get the app to load at all, but I never had that problem. Aside from that we had no issues with the app. Everything worked just as expected, and we did do a fair amount of moving fastpasses around. booking last minute ADRs, etc. As time goes on I expect MDE to become less buggy. They've already come a long way from the early days!

 

[AngiTN]

I think MDE in general has a lot of issues when you start connecting friends and family who have their own MDE accounts. Seems there are always one issue or another When those accounts are involved. I've forbidden DH From having one for that reason

 

[Jon84]

This sounds harsh but I think alot of the linking friends errors can be attributed to user error, at no point have I had problems linking, unlinking for people with and without their own accounts.

 

[AngiTN]

This sounds harsh but I think alot of the linking friends errors can be attributed to user error, at no point have I had problems linking, unlinking for people with and without their own accounts.

It may well be. I know many (but not all) of the issues with FP are from people either not paying attention or not understanding what was going on when they booked the FP. If you just click on one of the 4 options and don't bother to read it closely you may not even notice that the choices it gave you were different from the ones you selected to start.

This past trip we saw a very large number of people trying to use their FP hours before it was time. I have to think they just didn't pay attention to the times offered by the app when they picked their FP

 

[Lucius Best]

This sounds harsh but I think alot of the linking friends errors can be attributed to user error, at no point have I had problems linking, unlinking for people with and without their own accounts.

Just because you were fortunate enough to not have any problems linking friends on the app doesn't mean others' problems can be dismissed as user error. I encountered real software bugs that were only resolved by calling Disney IT, of course that doesn't mean everyone will run into them or that they haven't since been resolved.

I also had less computer-savvy family members who screwed things up on their own, but you could make the argument that those weren't just user error but also partly due to the app being difficult to use. For example, when I would attempt to modify a FP that was 3 days from now, the modify screen on the app defaulted to today's date instead of the date of the FP I had previously selected. If you weren't paying close attention you could modify today's FPs by mistake. You could call that user error, but you could also call it a poorly designed user interface that makes it easy for people to mess up their reservations.

 

[Jon84]

Just because you were fortunate enough to not have any problems linking friends on the app doesn't mean others' problems can be dismissed as user error. I encountered real software bugs that were only resolved by calling Disney IT, of course that doesn't mean everyone will run into them or that they haven't since been resolved.

I also had less computer-savvy family members who screwed things up on their own, but you could make the argument that those weren't just user error but also partly due to the app being difficult to use. For example, when I would attempt to modify a FP that was 3 days from now, the modify screen on the app defaulted to today's date instead of the date of the FP I had previously selected. If you weren't paying close attention you could modify today's FPs by mistake. You could call that user error, but you could also call it a poorly designed user interface that makes it easy for people to mess up their reservations.

I didn't say all. And user error is not just guests, the TDO staff are also end users of the system. It would be interesting to understand the figures of how many changes are made to FPs and ADRs after initial booking, and so see the number of support requests made vs the number of guests/parties over the same period. I'm assuming the guest surveys are not making Disney scrap features and go backwards.

I work as an system admin for the project management system in the company I work for. I don't make any changes to the system, and people are still able to break stuff, and make it not work as it should. I'm seeing this day in, day out, people don't read what is on the screen.

MDE needs a certain amount of user input to make it work, else we'd all be queuing up at a Genius Bar type thing for the first day of our vacations!

I agree the user experience could be better, I notice that my App updates every couple of weeks at least. So bugs are being reported and dealt with

 

[mickeyluv'r]

It used to be awful. But they have made major changes to it over the past few months. It works pretty well now. There are actually a few things that are easier to do on the app than on the website. Change FP is one of those. One year ago I never thought I'd be saying that. The old interface didn't inform you when it replaced a FP or changed the time on you. It just did it, you never confirmed the change. They fixed that and it works great now.

I hope this is true. I've always found it to be very glitchy and slow to load. (The main site is now worse than ever.)

Sometimes both just churn and churn.

I don't need park maps.

The only function I found slightly useful was checking our FP times, but opening the spread sheet I sent to our phones was far faster.

 

[KMcCP]

I thought this thread might be a good place to ask this:

We booked our trip last week for next year, October 2016. I know we still have quite a while until the real planning begins. Anyways, when I look at MDE on my computer, our reservation and tickets are there. But when I open the app, it only shows our tickets. I tried linking the reservation as suggested and it keeps telling me it's already linked. Are we too far out still maybe? Or just a glitch?