What we have here is a failure to communicate

I posted a review of Push 4.0, an iOS push notification app, this week at AppShopper. What I didn’t mention in that review is what drove me to find it to begin with, which was ultimately a lack of support and responsiveness from the first push notification app I’d tried, Boxcar.

Granted, there aren’t many push notification apps in the App Store right now and Boxcar is arguably the most popular one. But Boxcar stopped working for the most important RSS feeds I like to stay on top of and nothing in their troubleshooting tips helped, so I turned to their support forum. I found another user with the same problem and posted in his thread here to add my voice. That was back in May. Fast forward to July and there was still no update from Boxcar though others had chimed in to say they have the same problem.

I even pinged Boxcar on Twitter a couple of times and received no response there either.

Meanwhile, their support forums have many other threads where others are experiencing the same problem with RSS feeds, like this one started this month and this one started last month. Some of the threads involving RSS feed issues have responses from Boxcar employees while others, including the one I contributed to, don’t.

Finally fed up with the lack of a response, I looked for a new app with similar functionality and found Push 4.0. Push has been working for me almost flawlessly with the RSS feeds that seem to stump Boxcar.

I don’t hate Boxcar or anything but I am very disappointed with their support and won’t be recommending it to anyone based on this. To be clear, I don’t expect Boxcar to drop everything and focus on fixing this issue for me. In fact, I probably wouldn’t have been driven to describe my experience here if they’d even just acknowledged my inquiries and said they couldn’t find a fix. Any answer would have been better than none at all.

So if you’re looking for a good push notification app, try Fabien Penso’s Push 4.0. His app works and from what I’ve observed so far, Penso’s support is better than Boxcar’s.