Purdue students don't hold back when reviewing the most recent version of the university's smartphone application.
"Horrible in every way," "crappy," "completely awful" and "unusable at best" are just a few of the colorful descriptions found among the 65 reviews on Apple's online store. Of those, the new version of the app released last semester is overwhelmingly ranked one out of five stars.
After switching from software developed by College of Science students to in-house technology in 2014, Purdue officials again have plans to offer an app created by students for students under the university brand.
"The whole idea is we're giving them some real world experience, but as students they're looking at creating an app that's by them and for them," Martin Sickafoose, director of digital marketing, said in a phone interview last week. "They have a better pulse on what their peers are looking for."
Lead developer George Lo and his team of students certainly aren't an imposing group. Yet Lo asserted in recent talks with Purdue's tech staff that the product created by his iOS Development Club is better than the status quo.
What makes their app so much better? Developed over the past year using Swift, Apple's new coding language, it offers a more efficient, user-friendly experience, Lo said, along with the typical features like a campus map, bus routes and access to Blackboard and email.
"iOS users expect fast performance," he said, "so that's one thing that we really care about."
Now that it's approved for beta testing by Apple, students and staff can try the app out themselves by providing some information at http://goo.gl/forms/75YMZbS0cA. About 100 beta testers are currently using the product, while Lo said he hopes to recruit 900 more.