Editor note: Since publishing this review, its been brought to our attention by the developers that three factors influence whether the app will function to its full potential: 1) Location services must be turned on 2) Push notifications must be turned on, and 3) The flight you look up must be within 200 miles of your location. If all three criteria are met, the app works as promised.
The rating has been switched to 4 bars out of 5 to reflect this.
Just Landed makes a lot of sense as a concept. I don’t think I’ve ever been perfectly on time to pick up someone at an airport. In theory, Just Landed would make it easy to look up a particular flight and tell me when I need to leave to get there on time. But that theory doesn’t always prove itself out.
Just Landed tries to keep things incredibly simple by distilling its app into one search box button where the user can insert the flight number they’re tracking and get up-to-date info quickly and easily. When you know the flight number, it’s an incredibly quick way to get the information needed to pick up a friend. But if you don’t know the flight number, it’s a gigantic pain. There’s no way at all in the app to just look at a list of flights coming in to a particular airport. An update to the app added a ‘search’ feature that lets users look up the prefix to a flight number that identifies specific airlines, but that’s not exactly helpful without the numbers that come after it.
Once you’ve identified the correct flight, Just Landed is supposed to tell you when the flight is coming in, when you need to leave, and what gate it’s coming in at. It’s excellent about identifying flight times and gates, but it seems to get hung up when you want to know when you should leave. Initially the app asked me to turn on location services for this feature, but even with location services on, it seems sporadic at best. The app doesn’t offer any troubleshooting to fix the problem in its FAQ section, though there is a spot to send feedback. It’s entirely possible my trouble is more user-error related than app-related, though it’s hard to tell for sure.
Despite these flaws, I still really appreciate the core idea of Just Landed. I think it could be a bit more efficient and helpful to its users, but as a free app that gets you at least a little closer to picking people up from the airport on time, I think there’s lots of potential for it to grow into a great app.
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