Iridium GO!

If I could give it a zero stars I would. I bought an Iridium Go! Unit three months ago in March 2022 to use on my first ocean and single-handed crossing from Panama to French Polynesia. The app sucked from day one, but I persisted on my iPhone 8. In addition to all the hassles others have described, the text is so small I simply could not use it, so I would write in Notes and copy and paste. Then I overloaded it with too many texts, I have the Unlimited plan, and it just got all screwed up. Only solution was to delete all threads and start afresh! And the Iridium unit itself just stops working about once a week, only way to restart is remove the battery and put it back in. I fully get that this is a slow and tricky satellite system, and the hardware is mostly amazing, but be very careful with the tiny external antenna plug and the tricky power plug. Then I fried my iPhone8 with seawater, and now my backup iPhone 7 simply will not connect to it, luckily I have a very old iPad that does. Simply pathetic for the roughly 1000 dollars the whole system cost, not to mention the monthly fee. Come on Elon, get us sailboat folk something better to compete with Iridium, maybe that will wake them up.

I am a bush pilot and rely on the iridium go to stay in communication with my customers while in the air or in remote places. This new version of the app has resulted in me having to revert to a clumsy satphone. I can no longer see the phone number being dialed as it is obscured within the app. Messaging side just continuously spins as if its thinking. When i try to find support for help the site says its unavailable. Furthermore i did not even choose to update the app - it did so automatically. I no longer have the use of my iridium Go device. It seems that a device that is potentially used for critical purposes such as this should be pretty thoroughly tested before release. I would like to get the old app i was using back so my iridium go will function again but see no way of doing so. Very disruptive and annoying especially since the upgrade apparently offered almost nothing substantially new or useful. Please make old app version available so I can once again rely on this otherwise useful device.

We regularly sail offshore and use our iridium pretty heavily. I understand the speed and am ok with that. What I find incredibly frustrating is how poor the applications are written. The messaging app constantly reorders all the MSS messages, making the conversation unreadable. It always puts all the sender’s messages at the bottom of the conversation, bumping all the recipients at the top of the displayed conversation. This destroys the sequence of the conversation. This is a basic QA failure!! The mail and web apps have horrible connection logic, with little error handling and no connection retry on failure. This is short sided for a satellite device. Unfortunately, there is no alternative to the sms app. I’ve purchased third party connectivity apps to replace mail and web.