"App is basically unusable because it crashes every time I try to do anything on it" — United's 4.78★ rating hides a stability crisis at the moments that matter

United Airlines' official app is a full-journey mobile companion for air travel. It covers flight search and booking, check-in with mobile boarding pass, baggage tracking, real-time flight status and gate updates, terminal guides and airport maps, inflight entertainment and Wi-Fi purchase, MileagePlus loyalty account management, and self-service rebooking during disruptions. The app is free to download; flights, bags, seat selection, upgrades, and inflight Wi-Fi are paid à la carte within the app. MileagePlus members get free Wi-Fi on select flights and can redeem miles for upgrades. United positions it as the most comprehensive airline app, differentiating on feature depth and all-in-one journey coverage against Delta, American Airlines, and other carriers.

Users consistently praise the app's breadth. One reviewer notes it has everything you need for your flight, including easy access to menus, and pretty understandable upgrades for lounges and seats if desired. The check-in flow, when it works, is genuinely smooth: Simple, easy to follow, and checked into international flight in minutes! Booking and rebooking are intuitive — Very good app, easy to make changes. Text updates useful. And the depth of trip data stands out against competitors: all of the data available is far beyond what you get from other airlines. For travelers who hit a clean session, the app delivers on its all-in-one promise.

The most common complaint — and the one that undermines every strength — is that the app crashes or freezes precisely when travelers are under time pressure. One reviewer states flatly: app is basically unusable because it crashes every time i try to do anything on it. Another reports the app crashes every time I try to view my flights. This is not a rare edge case. Five users in this sample describe an app-crash-and-reinstall cycle, three of them furious enough to leave high-severity ratings. Four more describe the app becoming unusable within minutes due to crashes, freezes, and forced restarts. Three report the app rendering blank or freezing immediately on launch. When the app's core promise is real-time trip management, crashing when a user tries to view their flight is a failure at the most basic level.

Even when the app doesn't crash outright, it is slow enough to make check-in painful. One reviewer captures the frustration precisely: Since their redesign a while ago the app is just incredibly slow for me. Checking in for a flight routinely takes me 5 minutes and 2-3 attempts where before it would take less than 1 minute. Another user reports that the app is so slow to load even with excellent connectivity that they've given up and switched to the website. This sluggishness compounds the crash problem — users are not just dealing with one failure mode but two, and together they make the app unreliable for time-sensitive operations. Six users in this sample describe hitting feature dead-ends where an action simply fails with no explanation or fallback.

Basic Economy passengers face a specific friction point that has no workaround: the app requires them to pre-submit credit card details as a baggage guarantee before check-in will proceed. One reviewer objects: I should not be forced to submit credit card details in the event someone deems my bag is not the correct size. Another echoes the same complaint, describing the forced submission as unnecessary and invasive. This is a policy-driven dark pattern, not a bug, but it lives inside the app experience and creates a hard block at the check-in step for an entire fare class of travelers.

Multiple users report that checked bag prices displayed in the app differ from what they are actually charged at the airport. One reviewer describes the experience in detail: I got three different price quotes for checked bags. $30 and $45 for 1st and 2nd. Then $50 and $60 for 1st and 2nd. Another user reports paying more at the airport than the app quoted. Three users in this sample describe feeling cheated after paying — a price-to-value mismatch cluster that is especially sharp because it involves real money lost, not just inconvenience. When the app is the primary channel for managing a trip, inconsistent pricing erodes trust in the entire experience.

United markets inflight Wi-Fi as free for MileagePlus members, but the in-app experience contradicts that promise harshly. One reviewer describes the ordeal: Last flight took me 45 min to get into the section to 'purchase' my WiFi as a united 'member'. Why not make it one click fools. The login flow is circular and confusing, and on some flights Wi-Fi is entirely non-functional with no recourse for compensation. This is a broken experience at the one moment the app has a captive audience — 30,000 feet in the air with no alternative. The gap between the marketing claim (free, seamless Wi-Fi for members) and the reality (a 45-minute fight with a login screen) is one of the sharpest contradictions in the app.

Four users in this sample report that booking and reservation data fails to sync properly or appears corrupted in the app — and all four of those reports are high-severity. When a traveler opens the app at the airport and sees missing or wrong reservation data, the entire value proposition of an all-in-one travel companion collapses. This is not a cosmetic issue; it is a trust-breaking failure at the exact moment the app is supposed to be the single source of truth. Combined with the crash and slowness problems, it means users cannot reliably depend on the app to show them accurate trip information when they need it.

The unmet need is not a better United app — an indie cannot build an airline's official app. The unmet need is a travel-day companion that is fast, stable, and trustworthy during the high-stakes 24-hour window around a flight, when the official app keeps crashing. Travelers are already describing the gap: one user who finds the app so slow to load has defected to the website. Another who says the app crashes every time I try to view my flights has no fallback at all at the gate. The opportunity is a focused tool that pulls in the trip data travelers actually need at the airport — boarding pass, gate changes, baggage tracking, connection times — and delivers it with the speed and reliability the official app cannot. This does not require airline partnerships or license rights; it requires building something that loads in under a second and never crashes when a user is running to a gate. The 26 workaround mentions in this sample — users finding ways around the official app — are the clearest signal that demand exists for a tool that simply works when the incumbent does not.

No — not in the sense of building a replacement airline app. An airline app requires integration with reservation systems, check-in APIs, boarding pass generation, and baggage tracking infrastructure that only the airline controls. The real opportunity described above is a third-party travel-day tool that aggregates trip data from email confirmations and publicly available flight status APIs — but that tool would compete with existing trip organizers (TripIt, App in the Air) rather than directly replacing United's app. The structural moat here is real: the moments where United's app fails users most — check-in, rebooking during disruptions, baggage fee payment — are precisely the moments that require airline-system access an indie cannot get. The signal is valuable for understanding user pain, but the buildable surface for an indie is narrow and adjacent, not direct.