Hustle: P2P texting at scale

If you’re sending a bunch of texts at a time, you can’t just hit “send” over and over in rapid succession or it will take you into the body of the text and make changes. So you have to do it slowly which is annoying and inefficient. It also is not good at flagging all the responses as new/unresponded to. I have to dig through my conversations to make sure that I replied to everyone which is a lot when you’re texting thousands of people. It’s also irritating that when you hit “reply to messages” it inexplicably makes you swipe left before going into the texts—why???

This app is super buggy. I get the never ending spinning wheel about half the time & have to close down & reload. I can’t dictate text within the app which really slows me down if I need to customize a response. And it often capitalizes words unnecessarily which forces me to go back and correct it. Scripts disappear, forcing me to compose individual responses. The notes field is super short which means I often can’t provide the database managers with all the information I have. There’s also no predictive text when adding information in the notes which slows me down. Recipients would try to opt out by typing STOP; I’d see a notification indicating a recipient had opted out but they wouldn’t actually be opted out which led to them being super annoyed when we continued to text them. Separate from that issue, numerous people said they’d asked a previous sender to opt them out but they continued to get messages. While it’s possible that a previous texter forgot to opt them out, it happened so often that I can’t believe it was always user error. It would also be nice to be able to mark a recipient as “no further response needed.” I found myself texting fairly useless emojis just so I didn’t leave an unresponded message out there (eg I say “thanks for your support “ & the recipient says “you’re welcome “. I really shouldn’t have to say anything more but it still shows as a message that needs a response. Once you correct all these issues, it would be great if the app could show me my stats. I’d love to know my grand total of voters contacted, percentage of voters who responded, & where I rank compared to others texting for the same race. A little healthy competition is motivating!

I’m a pretty active organizer using Hustle to let people know about our upcoming events. I wish Hustle would give me push notifications for whenever a new workload is available. I have notifications turned on for the app in phone settings, but I never get anything from Hustle. (I did initially decline notifications when I installed, so maybe it’s a bug?) Also, let us mark conversations as No Reply Needed or something.