GINA – Smart coffee brewer

Last update was 1 year ago! Really?!

This app reminds me of the old Soviet Lada cars - its a barely functional, smoking mess. Standard journeys in pour over and immersion work fine, but hit any pothole and you are guaranteed off the road. It’s a shame, because the Gina itself is a BMW. Quality build, and onboard electronics that are great - except that there aren’t any visible instruments of course! This means that the app is the only way to access Ginas $100 ‘Smart’ features. It’s been 3 years since launch and my BMW Gina still hasn’t had a satisfactory Lada features update. In fact, the latest app version has gone from 1.5 to 1.0.7! Get with the program Goat Story! Users are well advised to put the Gina on a separate scale until you update this app - or better still, release an open source api and let the development community create a BMW interface for you!

My app loses the data from the cold drip brew halfway through the process so if I haven’t kept careful track of where I am in the brew, the brew is sabotaged. The Gina brewer itself is great but if I were buying again I’d get the non-smart version unless the app were to improve to the point of being functional for a longer brew. I have a joule sous vide and often use the joule and joule app to perform a cooking operation that takes several hours. The joule app doesn’t restart every time I navigate back to it and even if it were to do so it keeps track of what I am cooking and sends me notifications and would be able to reload all the data from the cooking action I was in the middle of. The Gina app forgets I’m in the middle of a brew and forgets all the details of that brew after ten minutes. So I could likely complete a faster brew method before the app sabotaged my brew, but the cold drip coffee brew is meant to take hours. My joule app clearly walks me through the steps I need to follow whether I am doing my own settings or following a recipe through the app. The Gina app doesn’t provide clear instructions and instead funnels you to videos with irritating elevator music in lieu of written directions. Thus if you want to double check one point in the brewing process it is hard to get that info off the app without having to rewatch the whole video.