Marco Polo - Video Messenger

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1. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

   Used to be great—greed ruined it. It’s really a huge disappointment. My whole family loved Marco Polo. It was our preferred method of keeping in touch. We would use the Sharecast feature for video updates of our kids. The ability to upload videos, the unlimited storage, even the transcripts of Polos was great. What was really amazing is that as a Plus member you used to be able to gift temporary Plus Passes to a few friends for free. But now, Plus memberships got more expensive and in order to access any features you have to pay at least $80 and now you have to pay to send Passes. The free version offers literally nothing. Meanwhile, the video quality remains poor—particularly if you download a video to save it (since you have to pay if you want storage!). It sucks to see a once great app ruined by coercion.

2. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

   It lags. The video most of the times doesn’t show up

3. ★★★★★subscription and paid restrictions

   WHY DID YOU REMOVE CLOSED CAPTIONS!!??. My wife is deaf and can only watch our family Polos with captions! Very ableist and a dirty trick by the developers and needs to be reversed! Even people who aren’t deaf or hard of hearing may like this feature to watch a Polo without the sound as to not disturb others. The developers of this app are constantly removing basic features and placing them behind a paywall, which has lead me to turn off auto updates for my apps. I only update the app when it stops functioning. This way I retain all the features that were once free but now cost money. The pro version should include extra features that are fun or “nice to have” but not a necessity.

4. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

   Transcript copy removed from pro. Hopefully this is just a bug, but the absolute best feature and the reason me and my developers where using pro and sharing was the transcript copy feature. This has been removed and it is rather frustrating. We are working around this of course but we are a small hobby team right now with the hope of growing capital in the future.

5. ★★★★★subscription and paid restrictions

   ableist to get rid of captions. what a weird & ableist choice to decide to remove the captions option/CC button… I feel like it’s one of those things that now people need to pay for, since I have a free Marco Polo account, but really? making people pay so they can actually access something? I feel like that’s literally illegal, because you are supposed to make things that are available for the public accessible, and this is an app that’s available for the public, but you’ve decided to make it less accessible… you should not have to pay for accessibility. bring the captions button back.

6. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

   Malicious functionality. App sends messages to wrong/unintended recipients without warning. Even after deleting the app and removing all data, app continues to send requests to random recipients. Unnacceptable.

7. ★★★★★subscription and paid restrictions

   So EXPENSIVE now. “Free version” terrible.. Stop making excuses. You created a great app and then ruined it by pay walling all of the features. You claim to have a free version, but the free version is so hard to use it’s ridiculous. It’s obvious only there for marketing purposes to catch people and suck them in. Cannot justify at these prices. The current annual price should be a one time forever charge and it should cost like a buck a month if you pay monthly.. Apple will put you out of business because now I can just send videos in my iMessages or to my kids in Snapchat

8. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

   Terrible. It takes way too long to load + you need more emojis. 😟 I will show you the emojis I want:🤩🤨😋🤪🤯🫢 🤦🏼‍♂️. And I want all of this to be free.

9. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

   LOVE IT. I absolutely LOVE IT!!!!!!!!!!!

10. ★★★★★subscription and paid restrictions

    Auto premium membership. Greedy developers want your money without your decision

11. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Great but greedy. This app used to be great but now most of the features are pay-walled. They send you bogus notifications to try and get you to open the app. The app is fine but it isn’t worth what they’re trying to squeeze out of people.

12. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Can’t hear phone calls while using this app. I can never hear my phone calls while I’m making a video

13. ★★★★★subscription and paid restrictions

    Coercive rent seeking app. Removed a lot of features in an attempt to coerce you into paying infinite amounts of money via a rather high cost subscription. They also let you stack up a bunch of videos in an attempt to hold the videos as ransom for the subscription. I would have paid a single fee or perhaps a far more reasonable subscription but between the high cost and coercive marketing ill never buy in ever

14. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Crazy price increase. I have loved this app for over 5 years. This year they are increasing the family plan by $40! That’s crazy, $119.99 to 159.99. They have not done any updates or improvements to justify such increase. Look elsewhere.

15. ★★★★★subscription and paid restrictions

    It should free. It should be free, not pay. Sadly million sheeples paid 🤣

16. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Don’t yall. This app freezes constantly won’t load messages it’s trash but my damn family uses it

17. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Money. I thought this was a free app.

18. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    No edit sucks. I loathe this app

19. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Forced Invites = Lost Customer. My parent sent me a link to set up a family group but in order to even set up an account it forces you to send an invite to five of your contacts, which I did not have any interest in doing. So now no one in my family will be using this.

20. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Help. Help; love the app love the idea keep up with family and friends in ongoing conversations and debates, but my issue is it will not refresh. It will not keep up. I lose a lot of conversation in the midst the only way I can get it to work is to uninstall, then reinstall, and that doesn’t always work and everyone on my pages complains about the same thing

21. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Lags and glitches - no support. I’m writing this review because support is unable to be contacted for some reason. I’ve tried multiple times and continue to get error messages. We have the plus version of the app and those features have not worked for months. The live text feature does not work. We have done trouble shooting on our end and again have attempted to reach out to support but still get error messages.

22. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    ugh. i put in my number and did not work at all! wast of my time

23. ★★★★★subscription and paid restrictions

    Poor customer service and not useful if others won’t join. I purchased this a year ago to try it out with my sister and family. They didn’t want to join and download a new app, and without anyone’s adoption it’s useless. I tried to cancel it the very next day, and I couldn’t get anyone to help me through Apple Store or Marco Polo. They refused to refund my subscription even though it was NEVER USED, and I had only purchased it for a day. Super frustrating and a waste of money and lots of time

24. ★★★★★a needed feature is missing

    Annoying. The app spammed me with “John Doe is on. Talk to them.” notifications. No, thank you. I will talk to them if I feel like it. I was given no option to turn this type of notification completely off. The max time I was allowed to silence it was 12 hours. I uninstalled.

25. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Disappointing. I renewed my Plus two days ago and I am STILL not able to use the features. It’s STILL set as basic Marco. Customer service has not responded after 48 hrs!!! I am STILL awaiting a response!!!! Very bad customer service.

26. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Bug issue?. Every other app that I use, my speaker is fine, but on this app, you can barely hear me when I talk

27. ★★★★★subscription and paid restrictions

    Free option awful, ripoff for Plus. Marco Polo was such a great invention! Unfortunately they’ve gotten greedy and like so many other companies have started ripping us off. They charge more for a monthly plus pass than Apple TV! If you are fine with the basics, then this is great for communicating with friends and family. But if you want to share pictures, be able to speed up, or listen in the background you’ll need to pay a ridiculous amount of $$.

28. ★★★★★crashes, freezes and errors

    Glitches. The last two weeks the app has had so many glitches. My friends and I have polos that don’t finish loading, stay black the whole time, or even just disappear. I started listening to one when I went into my house real quick, opened the app again and it was gone. Checked with my friend and its gone on her end too. Idk whats going on but the app is not working at all these days.

29. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Why should I have to pay just to be able to fast forward. I truly hate this app, I only use it because some family members insist on it.

30. ★★★★★privacy and excessive permissions

    Privacy violation. Constantly sending me notifications suggesting I chat with people from my contacts, even for someone I blocked years ago due to safety concerns. I did not give the app access to my contacts, and some of the suggested people are from contacts I deleted years ago. I have no idea how the app has access to these other than a privacy violation, and the notifications are obnoxious and unwanted. There’s no way to turn them off other than turning off all notifications which I don’t want to do.