Final Fantasy XIV Companion App — 2 Years Later

The Final Fantasy XIV Companion App has been released for almost two years now. How is my experience with the App until now? Why do I still use it? Is it even worth the time? I mean, it's been released two years ago. 

Before we begin: if you collect emotes, registering the app itself gives you a fun emote /tomestone. But let's get into the functions of the app.

The first point of the app, the chat function, would be a great thing to have if it actually worked properly! People hoped you can write to friends that are in-game. Nope, that doesn't work that way! What were we thinking?! You can only write to other App users.

But! Sending a message seems to take ages. While technically, yes, it is very correct and truthful by delaying the sent message, it just feels too slow. Specifically, you can't start writing the next message while waiting for the server to receive your message. That slows down the conversation a lot. While that perceived low speed of messaging is just a “minor” usability quirk, the other issue makes the whole feature useless: there are no notifications — I don't even know if I got new messages at all! I'm not a fan of polling my app to see if I got a message… Some people don't mind, but I do! Whatever floats your boat… but this makes it useless to me.

The calendar function suffers from the same issues as the chat function. So the main functions of the app are basically useless.

Inventory functions only work if your character is logged off. If you forgot to log out, no problem: the app can do that for you. But you need to be in non-instance area. You aren't? Tough luck. Login and move your character! But the apps is even slower here! The only use this has is when I'm on the go, usually with a bad internet connection, making this an even slower experience. Even with a good internet connection it sometimes feels like it'd be faster to boot up a laptop computer, log into the game, and do it yourself then ordering a Moogle in the app to do it for you!

I'm not even using that app anymore. I used still start it from time to time to see if it got any better. But now I don't even do that. Why do I still pay for the Companion App Premium then? Basically, I'm just paying for the extra Chocobo Bag — I'd have paid for an extra Retainer anyway. So I just said sure, deregister the extra Retainer and get Companion App Premium.