Princess Cruises Messenger at Mac App Store analyse

Background: Cruise ships are generally a zone where everyone should turn off data roaming on their phones because of the inordinate cost of accessing the Internet using your cell phone on-board. However, nowadays most major ships, including Princess, have ship-wide wifi. On Princess ships, once you connect to the wifi network, it allow you (for free) to view cruise events, schedules, etc. This is very handy. However, if you want to access other websites, your email, or anything else on the Internet, you must purchase paid minutes. I suspect most people don’t bother since it is slow and expensive. However, on big cruise ships, a major problem is getting separated from your group and not being able to communicate with them. Thus, being able to quickly message them would be a boon. Cruise ship companies know this. This app has a very promising feature set - using only the *free* version of the ships wifi network you can communicate with anyone else on-board via text messages. The app is basically just a front-end to a website i.e. it stores your user name and password and then it opens a page in Safari on your iPhone. The *critical* feature of the app is supposed to be push notifications, where, when you’re lazing on-deck around the pool, you’ll get an audio alert or a vibration when someone has messaged you. You are also supposed to get a notifications screen alert so you can quickly see you have an unread message when your phone is sleeping and you hit the home button. But, in this version, PUSH NOTIFICATIONS DO NOT WORK!!! This essentially renders the app mostly useless in my opinion, since who wants to spend 30 seconds every few minutes to log into a webpage to see if you have a message? Until Princess fixes this, I do not recommend this “app”. Once they fix this, it will be useful.

Have downloaded and am looking forward to trying this app out. Unfortunately, it only works on specifically equipped Princess Cruises ships! So the actual review will need to wait until after my next cruise... ** IMPORTANT: PLEASE UPDATE APP DESCRIPTION TO INCLUDE CURRENT SUPPORTED SHIPS **

Not a good app at all. Only good at checking account balances and a partial listing of events. Not worrh the trouble to figure out how to set up contacts and gives NO PUSH NOTIFICATION if using another app like reading a book or listenng to music. No instructions n the app and the ship does not even provide basic written instructions other than to go to the nternet cafe. Which is a mad house on the first day of a cruise. Needs alot of work.

Not at all impressed. Basically all this app does is launch Safari. It was not reliable messaging. Had to log in constantly. Constantly locked up.

Do you have to pay for ships wi-fi to use this?

The whole point of this app is to get push notifications of the messages sent through the messenger web app. This never happened. We gave up on messaging all together because without the push we would never know if we got a message unless we opened it. Go figure as soon as we got to land and turned off airplane mode all the push notifications came in.....

This app is useless and shouldnt be called an app at all. It is the same as a safari shortcut on your iOS home screen that then takes you to the ships intranet webpage. No push notifications and therefore no Apple Watch support gives this a single star.