Findster

I've been using Findster for over a year. I give kudos to their support folks for effort, but the best support in the world cannot make a bad product into a good one. These are the problems we deal with daily: (1) The app freezes and you don't know it. You glance at your phone and the dogs appear to be fine. Later you notice that they haven't moved in a long time. You kill the app and re-start it, and suddently your dogs jump to somewhere they shouldn't be, or even worse, their icons are grayed out because you've lost connection. This is the part where you freak out! We thought it was the old phone we were using, so we moved to a newer one; it changed nothing. (2) Charging is unreliable. At least once a week we'll get up in the morning, needing to use Findster, and either the Guardian or one of the on-dog trackers will not have charged overnight. Cleaning the connectors with alcohol does help, but the problem never fully goes away. (3) Devices come off the charger turned off. Why? The only reason you'd pull it off the charger is to use it. Turning each of 3 devices on is tedious and unnecessary. (4) About 1 time in 20, the Guardian or a tracker won't turn on like normal. Either it's on but the green LED "forgot" to flash, or it's in some funky state that's neither fully on nor off. You have to hold the button for a long time, get it to affirmatively turn off, then wait a few seconds and turn it back on. Sometimes you have to do this multiple times to get it to work. (5) We have two trackers. One lasts about 10-12 hours on a single charge; the other one lasts about 8. Eight hours is not enough. (6) The tracker gets to where it won't lock into place on the dog's collar. At first, it would click into place and you could be confident that it wouldn't fall off. After a few months, it changed to more of a "preference" for being in the right place, but you can still easily turn it to where it falls off. (7) Notifications accumulate and never go away even once they're irrelevant. For example, I just cleared a "low battery" warning from two days ago. (8) When drawing a fence, they won't let you zoom in to draw it as precisely as possible "because GPS is inaccurate". So you end up adding the forced-inaccuracy of your fence to the inaccuracy of GPS. It makes no sense. The hardware problems are the result of inadequate testing, which is perhaps to be expected from a startup company like Findster. The software problems are less excusable; I brought them to Findster's attention more than a year ago and nothing has changed. An app that crashes daily? There's no excuse for that.