So long, Foursquare
Today is the day that I finally stop trying to use Foursquare on my Android phone.
I've been using Foursquare for a fair old while, have racked up 5,880 check-ins, have earned 30 badges, and currently hold 12 mayorships (oh, how the mighty have fallen...), so this is not a case of "not getting it" or simply getting bored when the novelty wore off - I really like(d) Foursquare, but I have been unable to use it for 2 months now.
The reason for the rapid drop-off in my usage of (and affection for) Foursquare is simple - they comprehensively broke their Android app exactly 2 months ago and have seemingly done nothing to fix the problem.
The update on the 19th of January 2012 did something very bad for a geo-location app - it made it incapable of geo-locating you.
Now before you chime in and tell me to RT(F)M, turn on GPS, toggle the wi-fi connection, turn it off and on again, or even do a raindance, I should point out that the GPS works perfectly - my phone (and any other geo-location app on it) knows exactly where I am - but the Foursquare app seemingly does not.
As I type this I am sat in central London, but Foursquare thinks I am still at the train station in St Neots, Cambridgeshire - some 60 miles north of here, and a place I left over two hours ago - and no matter how many times I hit "refresh" it still thinks I'm 60 miles away. Not terribly useful.
Apparently I can make it wake up if I restart the phone, toggle wifi, or wave it around in the shape of the arcane sigil odegra in the language of the Black Priesthood of Ancient Mu, but that hardly makes for a good day-to-day app that "just works" - it makes for a frustrating user experience that "just doesn't work and prompts online rants after 2 months of waiting for a fix".
Yet there is a further wrinkle - if I open the map within Foursquare it will have a lovely blue dot marking my current location with admirable accuracy. Unfortunately I'll have to find it first, as the map will be centered on where I was 2 hours ago, but it deos prove once again that the phone knows exactly where it is - as does part of the Foursqaure app - but the check-in part of the app is experiencing epic levels of fail.
It's not like I'm the only person with this issue either - a cursory glance at the Android Market feedback for the app shows that this is a very common and visible issue - so there must be a very large number of users who are as frustrated as I am after 2 months of apparent inaction by Foursquare.
I used to use Foursquare a lot, and have seen it move from an interesting geo-location game mechanic through to a social recommendation and presence sharing platform, but Foursquare for Android is now an app that is only really useful if I want to share where I was an indeterminate period of time ago or see where my friends (possibly) are. For real-time participation it's utterly useless.
I would happily continue to use Foursquare, but 2 months of broken experience is stretching the loyalty of any digital consumer, let alone a tech-savvy one who could probably build an alternative Android app on top of the Foursquare API if he was so inclined.
I would also be more inclined to wait if there was some sign of progress from Foursquare themselves, but several subsequent updates have come and gone without fixing this incredibly fundamental issue or even acknowledging it and keeping their users updated.
Basically I'm bored of waiting and have decided that the utlity that their platform provides is outweighed by the sheer irritation of waiting for it to work again - they have lost a customer through sheer inactivity (or, less charitably, foolhardy indifference to those on the fastest growing mobile platform in the world right now).
