San Francisco Opera

I was eagerly anticipating using this app, when I first heard of it. I would love to have a one stop location for all of my SF Opera needs. However, the app does not live up to my expectations. It reminds me of the early days of the world wide web, circa 1997. Every company and organization of a certain size had set up a HTML website, but the websites were not very functional. In this case, the app seems like it could be much more, but it needs work.

The app has steadily improved and now I’m training myself to look here first for information on planning my evening at the opera. For example dining options inside the Opera House aren’t available on sfopera.org — or at least I didn’t find them after a 5-min search. But here they are in the app! The dining locations, their descriptions, locations, and menus, and a link to make reservations are all right here. I’ll never want to read blocks of text off my phone, such as the program or the extended program notes. But for handy and useful functions, this app is pretty good!

There is an obvious convenience for having an all-in-one app for SF Opera. The idea is sound. But the UI and overall performance needs work. For example, going to my account info, it uses the colorful background for the centennial. But it renders my account info all but unreadable. Make the pane more opaque. Accessing ticket information is slow and needs to be faster. Hopefully it’ll get better. I’ll give it 4 stars for now, hoping for improvements down the road. But it really is a 3-star.