HeyFam by Chatbooks

Edit —— 6/28/24 - the app has been fixed for now. I’m giving it a 5 star rating as long as it’s working as it should. Edit —— Family member were not showing up. They were able to post but not be identified. I signed out and tried to sign in again. Now I just have a spinning circle! This app is broken! I will gladly give it 5 stars if I could use it. This all is great! All kind of different conversations can go on at once and nothing gets lost in the thread. The complaint I have is lack of troubleshooting. I crated several custom rooms and they were working just fine. I went in later to add an additional room. I went through all the steps and it finished like it did with all the others, only the room doesn’t show up on the screen. Thinking I had done something wrong, I went in to try again. But when I clicked to create it, I got an error message saying I already had a room with that name. But it’s nowhere to be found!

Not happy with the update. I have 2 rooms HOSPITAL and FAMILY and I am unable to open the hospital room anymore.

Definitely some bugs and features that could be improved, but it’s a great messaging system for groups. I love that you can send pictures from the app to your chatbook!! It was so easy to make my mom a photo book for mothers day with pictures our whole family sent throughout the year. (My personal opinion: maybe rename to HeyGroup or something so schools and clubs are more inclined to try it?? I wanted to use this for a school group because it’s better than GroupMe but the name was throwing people off)

I have an iPhone and this app is not working right at all. It shows I joined my family, but then if I close it, it shows I’m not part of a family and won’t let me past that screen. 2 of my family member’s says it’s working for them. 1 has an iPhone and the other an android. They can see where I joined but I either get blank screens or has me enter my email then my phone number and can’t get any further. I tried using a QR code to get in and it still is not working. Deleting app and looking for something we can all use.

Constantly shows me that there are new posts on my banner, but when I go into the app, the new posts aren’t there. Randomly shows me what’s new over and over even though no update has come in. This app is poor.

The newest update makes me want to use another app. I don’t understand the need for the “home feed” when we already have dedicated rooms to such convos. Taking away reactions as well has been frustrating- not everyone uses chat books and wants to send photos there. We just want to react! The replies/reaction notification on the top is also annoying- I do not want to click through each notification to make the red dot go away. Please oh please fix these things.

While HeyFam started off as a great app, each release makes it more buggy and more complicated to use. This latest release has us absolutely scratching our heads. Most of our family can’t reply to threads, some of us can’t send photos, and none of us can report bugs. The navigation and structure of the app is confusing and unintuitive. The app icon went from being unique and cool to blending in with every other iOS communication app. What was once a great chat app that I recommended to everyone has become buggy, complicated, and nearly unusable. I wouldn’t recommend this app anymore until these issues get fixed.

We moved our family GroupMe to HeyFam and we love it. I love that we can have separate rooms and even private rooms. We use this function when we are trying to plan something special for someone in the main group but we want it to be a surprise. We have separate rooms for reunion planning and Wordle. It’s just fun to have what feels like a gathering area for our family! A few things I would love to see is: 1- the ability to actually delete a room, not just archive it. We had accidentally created two rooms for the same thing and would love to be able to completely delete it. I really like the ability to archive, just add the delete as well. 2- add the ability to create polls. A lot of times we are planning family functions and want to get everyone’s opinion between several different choices. We would love to be able to create a poll within the group room. 3- the ability to change the icon for the group. I have two different family groups, both last names start with “H”, so I have to “H”’s at the top and no way to differentiate. Would love to be able to customize at least the color if not more.

I would love to know if I like the app… I made a fam and selected rooms but then none of my rooms showed up. I deleted the fam to try again and now when I open the app its a black screen with a spinning loading symbol. I have uninstalled and reinstalled the app 3 times and can’t get passed the verification code after entering my phone number.

The three tab update is really annoying. It doesn’t open to the rooms tab which is the only feature I use.