Piazza is a great tool but a terrible app – Piazza Review

Let me preface this review with my love for Piazza as a website. I would give it a solid 4/5 for its web interface. It’s a great educational tool and I love it. That being said, it has some issues like failing to scale well causing long loading times especially for latex renderings and what not. Issues like these happen on both the web interface and the app but is much more pronounced in the app, making long threads unusable. Now for some App specific problems: - @post_id tags don’t work. They keep erroring out with a invalid CID warning when you try to go to the linked post. - Leaving the app (putting it in the background) and coming back to it causes the post you are looking at to change (it even changes the class you are looking at sometimes!). This is particularly annoying as good answers require you to reference outside materials and what not. Copying in text and links naturally ask you to put the app in the background which then requires you to navigate back to the right post. - anonymous <thing> is what they see in web view. This is useful when multiple people comment anonymously. However, on the app there’s no <thing> so you can’t distinguish who is who. Moreover it gets confusing when people say anon <thing> is correct. But then which post was from <thing> instead of <thing2>? Anyways, good platform for education but bad iOS app implementation. I hope it can be improved in the near future!
Review by erwang01 on Piazza.