British Airways for iPad 4+

This is very stylish, but doesn’t actual work so that isn’t very helpful. It took 3 goes to login. Then I go through the booking process and get to the payment, there the screen freezes with ‘getting your options’ or similar. Also, it included none of my information from my existing travel profile. BA’s IT has deteriorated so badly over the last 2-3 years it is tragic. It used to be the best, now it is the worse because aesthetics are being put ahead of functionality.

I’ve found one use for this thing in the time of COVID: it’s marginally faster to check ever-changing flight schedules than some alternatives, such as visiting the website. (Of course, I would never actually purchase a booking in this app, explained below in my review.)

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I’m honestly not sure why BA choose to keep this up in the store. It’s clear they’re not interested in maintaining it, as the tiny amount of functionality that it delivers now often doesn’t work as intended.

The booking search, for example, regularly aborts with a generic error message, implying an unexpected server response; also, the “nearby-date-prices” ribbon at the top of the search results is no longer accurate (off-by-one error). These behaviors imply that the app is no longer kept up-to-date with BA’s own backend services. Therefore, I would never trust this app to do the one thing it’s able to do: book a flight.

As a programmer myself, I hate having my name attached to a product that the business is no longer supporting. It reflects poorly on us as engineers, and once the dilapidation progresses past a certain point – as it has, in this case – then leaving the product available/accessible causes more damage to the company and its brand than simply disposing of it.

BA is hilariously bad at all forms of technology, and this new app is the pinnacle. It can't do anything that you'd ever want to do in an airline app: manage flights, check in, get flight status, access in-flight services, etc. It does exactly one thing: book flights. That's the one thing that I will never ever use an airline's own app for, since it would mean that I can't compare flights with other airlines.

This app is useless. I'd say to get the iPhone app instead, but that just kicks you to the website any time you try to use it (which then tells you you should be using the app!) so you might as well just stick to a browser. Or better yet, don't fly BA in the first place.