Bunk1

Four stars for the seamless app for the peace of mind that my Bunk notes arrive to my kids each day. Much easier and more reliable than the post office – – and I love the colored borders and photo upload. Minus a star that they seem to raise prices every year and not have bulk sales for more than one camper in session. I also wish there was a way to better show the layout. I have to keep guessing how much space I have on my note when I have a border and a photo. The vertical photo takes up more space than the horizontal photo. The red -line count showing you’ve run out of X # of lines when the message gets too long, does not work when you post a vertical photo and suddenly you have to guess how many lines of your message to remove. I wish the line count or the letter preview was more dynamic.

The app promises a lot of features that don’t actually work. Maybe my daughters’ camp just doesn’t use those features. I don’t know. All I know is that I spent $30 to send my daughters 6 messages. Maybe a 7th will get through. Again, I don’t know. I was never informed of a cut-off for sending messages but when I tried to send one at 7:03am a message popped up that Bunk1 messaging ended at 7am today even though my daughters’ camp continues until tomorrow at noon. I’m annoyed because I still had a dozen credits left. My Bunk1 also had no newsletters and no pictures were ever posted. The promise of pictures and updates were the whole reason I signed up. And the preview material makes it sound like campers will be able to write you back but that was not really an option either for my campers. Overall a frustrating experience - the app took entirely too long to download and had an exorbitant cost for the amount of communication actually facilitated.

First, let me state that the app is very good, I gave it 4 stars. Being able to send customized Bunk Notes to my children (with a photo, or sports scores, or a Suduko) and receive them back from them is such a relief! Last year they said they LOVED getting our Bunk Notes. And sending replies to us gave them a quick way to ask us to send them things they forgot or needed. Being able to see (and download) photos of them is wonderful! However, so far this year (2020) finding the photos has been difficult. Which is why I am giving it 4 stars instead of 5. This morning I received a Notification that each of my campers had new photos. Yeah! Unfortunately I couldn’t find them anywhere. Clicking on those messages in Notifications and clicking on the Gallery takes me to a page that has “No Photos Yet”, as does clicking on my campers mini photos at the top of the main pages. Why does it say “No Photos Yet” when there are photos? To find the photos I ended up clicking on every single link in the app before clicking on the little square next to the heart in the upper right corner. A frustrating waste of time. My wife had received the same notifications on her IPhone, and clicking on the messages took her to the photos. She was asked to confirm that they were our campers, which she did. Perhaps confirming them breaks the link to those photos? If so, I suggest you fix that so it doesn’t break the link. Sometimes it’s easier to find individual photos thru the Notification. Lastly, if you can increase the type, number and variety of things (there is only 1 suduko puzzle, no other puzzles, there aren’t any jokes or funny sayings) you can include in the Bunk Notes, that would be great!