Iowa Lottery's LotteryPlus

The ticket scanner to check if you have a winning ticket has been broken for years. Probably over five years now at least that I know of. Stop prioritizing releasing updates for whatever current events you have going on and take the time to fix your unusable, non-intuitive, non-user-friendly app. Give your software engineers capacity to work on what needs to be worked on, which is very obviously tech debt. I feel bad because I am a software engineer and I know someone worked hard on this application, but the fact that it’s practically unusable for one of the main things that users will likely use it for makes it useless. Make it a top priority to fix the ticket scanner and whatever other major issues are being reported by users. Listen to your customers!

When will improvements be made to the app so that it’s not so bad? Even the ePlayslip is a joke. Does anyone ever use it? Does Iowa lottery track whether anyone uses it? You can only put on one play per slip. So if you want five plays, for one draw, you would have to have the cashier scan the first playslip, take back the phone, switch to the second play slip, hand back the phone to the cashier, the cashier hands it back to you. You find the third playslip, hand it back to the cashier, the cashier hands it back to you, find a fourth playslip, hand it back to the cashier to scan, he hands it back to you, you find the fifth playslip, hand it back to the cashier to scan. Stupid.

App worked fine for a week or so, but now I can’t even check tickets, which is the whole reason I purchased this app, which seems to be a very common complaint with this application. Don’t know why it works for the first week or so and then stops, almost seems like it is programmed this way to harvest data to sell analytics companies, works just long enough for you to download, use for a while, and then forget about, so it can now get info on your habits to sell to advertisers to try and place ads to make you more likely to purchase products and services. Delete apps you no longer use, they can still harvest information about you to target ads to you, even if you op out of sharing info. Apple tries to make it look like youre completely in control of you data, but these apps have a way of fingerprinting your device and can still figure out who you are and still have ways of targeting you with ads and apple is doing nothing to stop them.