Rover – Pet Sitters

I have been a pet sitter now for almost 3 years and love the app and I’m very active with River. 720+ bookings so far and start sitter status. In the last couple of weeks though I have noticed that the app is granting itself permission to communicate with my “files” app on my iPhone. When I first noticed it, toggled the permission off. Only to find it back in later in the day. After a little trial and error I figured out that it’s happening whenever I upload photos for a visit via the app. But this shoukd not be happening because the photos come from the photos app. The files app has documents and files for my personal life and there is nothing from there I would upload to send to an owner and River has no reason to be communicating with my files. This was never a problem before until 2 weeks ago. I went for Rover Support who took the info from me and said I would get an email from tech support. This is a big privacy issue because it’s connected to an unrelated process and there is nothing way for me to proactively turn off permission and prevent Rover’s access. I’m giving The benefit of the doubt that this is just a bug and not something intentionally set up. But it needs to be fixed. I’m going to stop using the app for photo uploads and will rely only on sending photos by text message. This is unfortunate because it means I will no longer be able to send videos which are only sendable via the app. Once this is fixed I’ll moved the 4 stars backup to 5

I’m both a dog sitter and owner and this is such a great service BUT the app is terrible. 1) When I make changes to my sitter profile and click Done, the changes are not saved. 2) I just found out that when you select “Depends” for “Friendly with Dogs?“, it doesn’t show up on your dog profile at all for pet sitters! So frustrating as this is such important information! 3) There is no way to update your profile name and there is no way to set more than 1 dog owner. So only 1 dog owner’s name is shown. When the other owner is talking to pet sitters, they have no idea who is talking to them and you have go keep signing your name. Moreover, when I created my pet sitter profile (my husband created our dog owner profile) the app took my husband’s name automatically for the pet sitter profile and didn’t let me enter my own! 4) The icon on the top left that you click to switch between “Past/Archived” and “Pending/Upcoming” doesn’t make any sense! I have never seen that in any other app. I’m an experienced app user and I worked for an app for 5 years and it took me a while to figure out how to find messages with our past dog sitter. Even after I learned that you have to click on that icon to switch to “Past/Archived” messages I still forget how to do it because it is just not intuitive. You should just have one inbox and let people Archive what they want.

I have used Airbnb to books days for myself so when it came time to need to board my pup it was awesome to find a similar service for him. My dog is not the type of personality that would be happy at all in a boarding facility with kennels. I was even able to find a sitter that enjoyed the fact that he wanted to sleep up on the bed. It seemed that no matter what needs my dog had there was a compatible sitter for him in the cities I looked. Some people offer to take big dogs running or have children to tire out even the most energetic of dogs. So just like with Airbnb for myself not every single house looks like a place that is good for my personality but when you find a good match it’s a great experience. My pup didn’t seem to want to leave much when I picked him up. It wasn’t like he was going crazy missing me and that’s a good thing. I was sent photos during his stay and I was able to contact and communicate with the sitter at any time, which I didn’t necessary because she was sending updates and pictures a few times a day. I actually wish I had more needs for boarding he was so happy. I am having back surgery this month and I’m going to use Rover to find someone on a few occasions to come and take my puppy out for some physical fun and maybe to the dog park while I am down. It’s just a great service you can find somebody to do whatever you need, wherever you are that will match your dogs personality and be affordable......Like I said it’s Airbnb for dogs.