Chirp Access

This app is poorly designed, barely functional in the best of conditions, and prone to failure locking you out of the apartment. In all my time using it the “spaceship door” feature has worked maybe once. Otherwise it functions like an key card that can run out of battery and doesn’t work when you don’t have ideal service (foolish building management of course requires its use even in lower floors and parking garages with poor service). The people who designed this app should be embarrassed to have put out such a poor quality product. The executives who make contracts with companies for its use should be ashamed to be pushing this basically scam product. Everyone who helped worked on this app should regret that they wasted part of their limited lives on such a project. Any potential renters should take it as a major red flag if any apartment building uses this app and not rent there if they have any remotely habitable alternative. If I were in a state legislature or city council I would introduce legislation making it unlawful for any residential building to have access controlled exclusively through a smartphone app.

The Idea is perfect…not having to take your keys or key fob out to open doors or ride the elevator. The execution, not so much. Chirp was recently installed at our apartment community, but has since been more of a headache than an upgrade. I do have to start with how much I like the front door functionality, works every time. Access to all the other community entrances is where the problem is. With the spaceship door activated (all appropriate settings turned on) the community doors and elevators do not sense the app most of the time or takes too long. Most of the time the elevator doors will close and start to move before it allows you to select your floor. If you keep the doors open while trying to connect the alarm goes off before you can select your floor. Seems like the hardware/software for these doors/elevators are not as good as the front door locks. Good thing we still have our original key fobs to use, but seems counter intuitive to have to use two separate products for the same purpose.

The concept is cool, but our community doesn’t give us a fob alternative and I’m stuck with this horrid experience. The fact that you have to click to call the elevator and then again once inside the elevator is a joke! Way over complicated and if I am in the parking deck with very little signal it won’t work. Mgmt says to connect to their wifi but that’s also spotty - so I have to open the app and click what I want in just the right spot or it doesn’t work and I have to try 1,2 or even 3 additional times. Front and back elevator doors also add to the confusion. Mgmt says they have requested to change some of the titles. For example we have Elevator 1 (Lobby) and Elevator 1. These work differently as one option is for inside the elevator and the other is for a different access point to that elevator. Get the insanity yet? If you are planning to add this to your community then I suggest waiting. It’s not ready. Funny enough they changed titles literally 1 hour after I asked about it. See what I mean, not ready for full market adaptation. Mgmt should not be constantly trying to sell this crap to me just so I can access my building.