Roommates by Roomi

This app was great a year ago when I was using it to find a place to live. Now I’m trying to find a roommate and nothing looks or works half as well as it did before. If I click on someone’s listing or profile and go back to the search page, it takes me to the top and I have to scroll all the way back down. I’m seeing random listings for anywhere in the country when I live in NYC. Filters dont work, if I search a certain neighborhood I still get listings from all the other boroughs too. The living preferences questionnaire is gone, so I can’t have an easy place to show smoking, pet, cleanliness preferences. Now there’s just the lifestyle portion of the profile, but it’s not nearly as thorough as before. Example: you used to be able to put yes, no, or 420 only for smoking preferences and now “420 friendly” is the only option. All the positive reviews are from 2-3 years ago, so app developers should really think about going back to the way things were then.

Where to begin, this app comes off as something that SHOULD be a useful tool, and has all the functionality of a useful tool but completely falls flat in terms of implementation. Other user reviews detail a very pay to play experience which within itself isn’t terrible most apps have a basic monetization scheme that you can usually play around and this is no different. But the main concern I see voiced that needs to be addressed is the buggy and inconsistent UI and the clunky UX. My first time using this app it immediately shot me into a screen that prompted me to upload my proof of being a realtor even though i’m moreso looking for a place, once that was remedied i was inundated with business who more than likely paid to use the platform to promote their own services. Even after getting through all of this at the end of the day either some piece of the geolocation logic or mapping broke so listings would pop in and out of the map (the only reliable way to scan matches for places in a given area due to the aforementioned clunky UI), and when you finally find a place and a suitable match when you move to message someone the entire messaging client implodes. As for the webapp experience I cannot say it’s much better or even a viable alternative as half the time your screen whites out after viewing a few pages and all the API requests return empty responses in the browser developer tools. tl;dr Would be a great service if the implementation were more well thought out, not worth any time in its current state.

There’s so much wrong with this app from the get. I desperately wanted it to not be as bad as the reviews make it out to be, but literally from the get it was problematic. I opened the app and tried to enter the city my listing was in, it would come up, I’d tap it, and NOTHING would happen. You can’t get anywhere in the app unless you tell it where your listing is. Ok, so I guess choose something close in the list of offered cities, right? Do that, go through sign up and enter my information and pictures, have to describe myself in EXACTLY and ONLY 50 characters (if you use less, you can’t continue with the app, thankfully I finally found the correct combo of words to equal exactly 50), and then I’m allowed to see the folks in the ‘near to my listing’ city. So I go to enter the exact address of my listing, nearly 10min into working with this insanely buggy app, only to JUST NOW find out the reason I was tapping on my city but nothing was happening: ROOMI DOESN'T SERVE MY CITY. Why in the hell do (potential) users have to go through an entire sign up process to find out Roomi isn’t available to them??? It’s because this app is just terrible. My husband works in software and app development and his company, which is certainly much smaller than Roomi, would never release a product with so many bugs. Do you guys not have QA testers, or AT LEAST beta testers, Roomi? If not, you desperately need some. This app is seriously terrible.