Piazza 4+

The app was bad to begin with, but somehow it became even worse in the past couple years. To the point that I feel compelled to write a review.

It’s very sluggish, unresponsive and buggy. It takes at least two attempts to log in every time (with the new way of logging through the institution’s auth system). When tapping on a question/note, sometimes it just wouldn’t load. The editor is obsolete and very inconvenient (try typing a LaTeX equation in there, with switching keyboard layouts to type those double $$ signs). It lacks some of the features of the website version, like seeing if someone likes a comment or a post, or some options that are available for instructors.

The list goes on. If you care about your product, please redesign and refresh the mobile app.

It’s been three years, and the app still only supports bold, italic, and underline formatting. As a CS instructor I need to use the web interface to do monospace text and paragraphs, which is quite common.

In addition, when selecting a question there’s an annoying two-to-ten second delay before anything but the first half-line of each post or response is displayed.

The text entry box gets confused if you switch out of the app and back to copy some text, or if the keyboard is temporarily dismissed, such that the cursor location is under the on-screen keyboard.

I have given up on trying to use this app. Every time I want to use it to look at Piazza on my phone, I try to log in only to get vague “Please authenticate” errors. I then try to authenticate by going down and authenticating through my institution (horrible UI by the way - why even have a sign in if won’t work without a completely separate sign in). But yet, this doesn’t work either - I successfully sign in only to get stuck at an “Authenticating” page.

As it is, even once in, the app is extremely buggy and crashes often. It seems like it’s mostly an embedded webpage of Piazza, which is already an unstable and bloated web service.

So, as I said, I’ve given up. I just sign in through Canvas on my phone now and look at the embedded Piazza page there. It’s definitely not ideal, but hey, nothing about Piazza is.