AlphaPortal

While they have made a number of improvements to this app in a week, it still lags behind where it should have started given the features of the app it replaced. Notifications remain inconsistent, in that not everything you check to be notified about notifies you. The map is outdated and has the wrong school labeling, meaning they pulled data that was probably a decade old to produce this app, for some reason. Substitute buses have not been logged properly, so tracking is worthless. It states when the bus should arrive, but doesn’t log the actual arrival time, so there is no way to confirm when the bus arrives at school, for instance. I have increased by rating by one star because they are clearly listening to feedback, but this was clearly not ready on day one, and I have to question the decision made to switch to something that remains incomplete and inconsistent with what parents need.

Icing on the cake, after a number of issues… - phone app version does not generate activation links (I have number of screen shots and days of trying with the 2 min timer kicking off and searched my trash and spam folders and ended up with nothing -> only worked to kick off the activation link if I used my personal laptop…nothing explained this, no FAQ made me miss the sign up date for the first day of school. - School was not even listed correctly when trying to set up my student and again lost another 3-4 days trying to find someone to clear this up as there were potentially two schools listed that each possessed half of my child’s school name -> finally got that resolved by contacting someone at the school because the county’s transportation services would never pick up the phone - LAST but the worst….and currently dealing with…finally get my child set up and she rode home on the bus in the afternoon…3 hrs later her entire profile and bus route assignment is GONE!!!! I have no idea what bus number she may have in the morning and when I tried to re-enter her information it says she exists but no transportation is assigned!!!

The whole purpose of a bus tracking app is to let parents see when the bus is approaching, whether it’s running late, or if it isn’t coming at all. So why is the map only available once the bus has already arrived at the stop? At that point, the tracking feature is no longer useful. This design makes very little sense from a parent’s perspective. Parents need real-time information so they know when to have their children ready and whether there are delays. It feels like the people who developed this app didn’t consider how parents actually need to use it.