As most of you know I purchase most of the SatNav products for the iPhone to give them a good test side-by-side to take a look at features, how well each application works and to see the pro’s and con’s of each application.
This week I decided to purchase NDrive to take a look and see how good it was, the screenshots looked pretty good but as the old saying goes “Never judge a book by it’s cover” and I can definitely relate to this with NDrive.
Much to my dismay when I purchased and downloaded it, ran it up, took my first drive (a 30 min drive) and it crashed 4 times! Had to switch to CoPilot in the end to navigate me to my destination. At this point I would try to show you what happened but it’s just the application crashes to the main program screen so there’s no errors.
So I then decided to take a look at a number of the features within NDrive, e.g. Traffic. Switched on Traffic and got my next surprise, a HTTP Error (see below). Whenever I tried to search for Traffic this error appeared, and also over a three day period (and still is showing the error) again not good. So I power cycled my phone, decided to do another hour trip, NDrive crashed no fewer than 12 times back to the main home screen on the iPhone!
At this point it was really starting to annoy me. I decided to check the ABOUT screen to see what version I was running and I could check to see if others were experiencing it, that’s when I found the following screenshot below. Bearing in mind that I purchased this for $34.99 from the Apple iTunes App Store out of my personal hard earned cash, it says “Developer build *DO NOT TEST*”.
That explains it! No wonder why I’m seeing so many crashes, the build that NDrive have uploaded for all of their regions (and I did purchase several regions) all have this in the about screen and are all crashing in the same way. So these builds NDrive have provided for sale for App Store customers are all untested developer builds, so people like myself (and you) are going to be wasting a lot of money buying these builds that do not work!
To then give NDrive the benefit of the doubt, I thought maybe, just maybe that other customers haven’t experienced the same bad experiences I have experienced so far? Let’s check the Apple iTunes Store for feedback (which I didn’t do before purchasing it). They have only 7 ratings for a product that’s been available for nearly 2 weeks, most are 1 star! That doesn’t look good either.
Okay, this is really starting to concern me now, so I then check the feedback comments from these customers, and then I see the evidence to backup the problems I am experiencing…
Oh my, looks like a lot of NDrive customers are experiencing similar problems. I guess this is how not to market your product and post developer builds to the App Store and let customers find out just how bad your application is.
I’ve also had lots of problems getting a GPS Fix where CoPilot can get a GPS Fix within seconds on the iPhone. $34.99 absolutely wasted (and for me even more seeing I purchased multiple regions!).
I really wish my experience could have been a better one!
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