Timehop 4.0 - Celebrate the best moments of the past with your friends

I like the previous version better.

100% agreement from the non-techie people in my family is that this update is terrible and make Timehop a worse product. I have to agree with them.

Poor UX decision ... completely ruined my best App. Its of no use now. Impossible to view photo in horizontal scroll. Stupid design mistake !

Now there's version 4.0 and I'll have to install timehop again. I just wish I'll continue using it from now on.

TL;DR - one of my favorite apps went to the crapper with a new version, and this is a long rant about that. Feel free to skip. I hate leaving extremely bad reviews generally, since the new version was released just in time for the holidays, and many people I assume had some tight deadlines to make it happen. So sorry in advance. Maybe some of this will even be productive feedback. However, with 1900+ 1 star reviews in the Appstore, it's safe to say that this update didn't charm the users, so it's not only me. It starts awesome, logo didn't change, and then, Abe the cute dinosaur, whom I love, is spinning the loading spinner, and it has a little bounce! How cute! Who came up with this? If the rest of the redesign will be in line with this, it's going to be GREAT! Then, the app shows me the newb (been using it since it came out) how to use it's new interface, ok, looks pretty much like snapchat stories, tap on the right goes forward, tap on the left goes back, on top I can see the progress. Seems easy enough. Then I see "hold" to zoom out. Zoom out? Why would I need to zoom out? I usually zoom in if I want, but since the app looks at almost 10 years of my history, only half of which was shot in portrait, how would they zoom in? I know there are algorithms to zoom in according to "interesting" parts in the image, so maybe the used them? We'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Then, I see "swipe up" to share, which I immediately try, and it doesn't work, the app swipes back. hmmm, let's try again, to back to the slide, and swipe up, the app swipes right... hmmm probably doesn't work on the sponsored slides (which btw, prepare me the user for a barrage of ads right there in the UI, I KNOW there's going to be ads there, IT SAYS SPONSORED) OK, finally, my 1 year ago! Ohhh full screen image, wait a second, where is the other 3 people I remember from that picture? oh, I need to HOLD the picture to see all of it? Well...that's... ok, breathe, it might be good. Maybe it's like Facebook, and I can tilt my phone, and I'll see the whole pic? Nope? Oh well they must have a patent on this. Next picture... is the same.... since I usually take about 5-10 pics in burst to make sure I got one right, this one is on me, tap right again, maybe the next one will be different. (if only they had a feature to combine burst pics to a gif like that memento app? how cool would that be?) BUT WAIT, what is this gray screen? Is this the LOADING screen? Why is loading screens that are that gray? Without any progress indication, without lower res. placeholder of that picture? Is this 2005? Next swipe/tab (you can do both btw which is nice) - and I see this weird "gif" that they made from 2 pics that look the same (h they did make that feature, yay!!). But...I can't even zoom in this! Every tap, moves forward 1 hop, when I HOLD to zoom out, because this animation is also cropped to infinity, IT MOVES FORWARD, why oh why is this UX pattern not consistent? Why did you arrive at a conclusion that SOMETIMES holding will zoom out, and SOME other times, the hold will do nothing, and only when I release, it will move forward one hop? Also, there's no immediate visual indicator that the next hop is going to be an animation and not a pic, since all pics from that event look the same, and timehop randomly chooses they pics that are standalone, and the ones that are animated, I can't know if it's going to zoom, or be shareable until I try, or until the little white "share" comes in my view. :/ Ok ok, keep it together Alex, it still can get better, it can't be all bad, it's Christmas. Let's maybe try to shar this weird GIF thing... hmmm what do you mean I can't? oh Timehop.... Next hop is 3 pictures, in frames, arranged in a very weird way, on a very light teal background, and honestly, they look just bad. The images are too small to see any details, there's 3 of them on my screen, the empty space between the frames is wasteful, and it's just looks meh... Can I share that? nope, can't... probably best though. Ok, I'm getting tired of this, let's see how long this day in history lasts, and how more hops I have to jump through (get it? heh) I start swiping right, and instead of loading the images, it's just a gray screen after grey screen, sometimes a bright white teal one shows up. The thing where it said SPONSORED before, now shows a progress bar, which is a cool feature, but that progress bar is limited to THAT hop, so there's no way of really knowing how much history timehop has for me that day :/ Timehop started annoying me this year anyway, because retention makes no sense, WHY do I need to keep a streak of daily visits in the app? Sometimes, when my day a year ago, was extra cool, or I shared extra many pics, a notification can come in handy, but EVERYDAY? even when that day was boring across all 10 years of my social history? WHO MADE THAT GAMIFICATION horrible? and now this unfortunate redesign, and a re-concept. This would be a hard bounce back :/ Timehope, please get your ducks in a row, I used to love this app! Please bring back the things me and everybody else loved. And while I'm not in favor of bashing people publicly and wishing them wrong, please fire the person in charge of this release, and give the person who came up with the Abe spinning the spinner animation to be in charge, he seems to know what we want!

I loved this app but the new design isn't useful for those of us with large photo libraries. I have 40,000 photos over 15 years and tapping through isn't efficient, its painful and it's bad design. Did you do any usability studies to experiment with the new layout? What are you trying to achieve? I just had to remove this app from my main screen, it's useless now. What are alternative apps? Try Memoir (iOS for sure).

I hope the new COMING SOON features and the NEW SURPRISES have an option to revert to the old Timehop

This is terrible. I want to see the context of the tweets. All I see now is "@username thanks for sharing that" but I have no idea what I was referring to. Please bring back the old one. This one is painful.

Why this? 😕