Swarm: Check In, Explore, Map

I love the history aspect of this app. I’ve been using it for over 10+ years now faithfully. I came over when it was just one app, Foursquare. Before this, I was using Loopt, which didn’t make it. I wish I started out using this app first. I missed some great years and great check-ins I couldn’t merge into this one. But Swarm has been very useful. I’ve even mentioned when I got pulled over one night randomly going home when the police officer asked me where am I coming from. I just said I just left dinner and showed him the app. He asked do I log everything. I said yes. Because of random situations like this. I’m where I’m supposed to be. Plus I like it. The pics aspect. Etc. I wish it could integrate into the journal app or vice versa. Not sure how that would be done. But it’s great. I miss the watch functionality of adding badges and being able to talk to add to it. But maybe that wasn’t utilized enough by everyone. But I hope this app never goes away.

I’ve had Swarm since it was just Foursquare. Swarm is actually useless these days for anything other than logging where you’ve been. That’s really the only reason I still use it. I like to see where I’ve been and when it was. That’s come in handy when traveling because sometimes on vacation I can’t remember “that little shop” or restaurant. The coins mean nothing and can’t be used for anything...not even a free drink or discount at a bar or cafe. I have about 43K coins and have no idea what they’re for or how to use them. It’s basically a check-in app I use with only a single travel buddy so we know where we’ve been during our travels. I’ll use it as long as it’s available on my phone.

I was a Foursquare user for a long time, then got moved to Swarm when they were forcing people to switch. It has been a great way to keep a history of my check-ins, and I like to have it linked to my twitter. I have two huge problems though and they have persisted for years and I have emailed and tweeted support multiple times and they either ignore me or tell me they are “working on it.” Well, they’ve been “working on it” for years now and nothing has changed. First, the app is hit-or-miss in whether it recognizes an event is taking place at the location of your check in. For example, checking in at a music venue and it doesn’t recognize a concert is taking place, or at an arena and it doesn’t recognize the pro sporting event that’s happening. This has gotten worse the last few years and it only recognizes maybe 60% of the events I’m attending. And these are huge events with anywhere from 1K-20k people. Secondly, if you have the app linked to twitter, it tweets your check-in, then ruins it by sticking an ad in the tweet with a pic of their logo and link to the Swarm website. It makes your timeline ugly as hell and you can’t change it. I wish to hell there was a different app I could use for check ins but unfortunately Swarm is the only one, so I’m stuck. I would pay $$$ for an app that fixed these issues, but oh well.