NYC Ferry by Hornblower Reviews

Not sure why NYCFerry is on the store. I can’t buy tickets with my cc. I emailed support four days ago with screenshots of the problem and they never got back to me. So maybe someone will listen here? I am iOS 15. I downloaded NYCFerry on Wed. When I go to buy tickets I go to Select Payments. Then Manage Payments. I add my cc info. Pressed purchase. I get an error message that says I have to go back and add the name on the credit card. Cool. There is one problem though...There is no category for entering the name on the card. I wrote to Support and heard back from them that day. I supplied screenshots of the walkthrough. I thought this may be an app bug, so I force quit NYCFerry and ran it again. Nothing. I reinstalled NYCFerry . Still no Name on Card category. I am assuming this might be a database issue on their end. I had to buy my tickets from my desktop. This little bug kind of defeats the purpose of having an app to buy tickets. Please fix this.

The behind-the-scenes functionality of NYCFerry is fine, mostly. But the user interface/experience is probably the worst in the entire App Store. It’s pretty clear that nobody programming this thing has ever tried to use it in real life. It should be used in UI/UX courses as an example of how to do everything wrong. Just mind-blowingly incompetent. Please, just fire the entire UI/UX team and hire someone else — anyone else. Here’s just one example of the hundreds of failures: suppose you have one ticket already bought, but you want to buy another so that two of you can board the ferry. You can’t. Literally everything is like that in NYCFerry. Ask yourself: “What is the obvious, most helpful way to implement some particular feature?” And you can be sure they did it some terrible other way.

All is just wonderful.
Only one thing!!! NYCFerry doesn’t have real live schedule. It doesn’t tell you if a ferry is late, so you get to the pier at the time scheduled but it won’t tell you it’s late. A bummer cause one can be sometimes waiting half an hour or more not knowing if it will come or not. Other than that, better than trains or buses.
There could be more routes.

The main reason I choose the ferry is because of space in between passengers and air. It has been on time gets me to my destination quickly.

Traveling by ferry in New York City is a wonder, but the ferries are underutilized and poorly advertised. The ferry at Brooklyn Navy Yard, for example, could be a very popular route for people based around Flushing Ave to get to the city, but hardly anyone seems to use it and even finding the ferry landing is an adventure. The MTA needs to connect the ferries to passengers more effectively and advertise the services they offer.

The old app was simple and easy to use. The main issue with the new one is that it takes way too many clicks to get to the use ticket section, not ideal when you want to quickly load a ticket when in the queue and about to board. It also does things like remember the last number of tickets you bought and so you have to unset that if you bought multiple tickets last time otherwise you end up over purchasing.

I don’t understand why the close or back button is in different location on different screens. Also you should be able to access your tickets in any sccreen. You shouldn’t have to back out of schedule to access your tickets.

NYCFerry absolutely destroys my battery. After installing NYCFerry my battery would drain completely in about 2 hours. This happened consistently for about a week. After removing, it is back to normal. Until this is fixed I don’t recommend using NYCFerry .

NYCFerry itself is useful. I like the integration with Apple Pay to purchase tickets. Also nice to view the schedule at a particular departure point.

I suppose I’m in the minority given the otherwise high rating for NYCFerry, but there’s absolutely no need to gate functionality here behind a sign in. I just wanted the schedule, not a frustrating 5 stage sign-in and verification process. I completely understand the need for an account should I then choose to purchase a ticket, but this is not helpful or enjoyable if I just want information.

The latest update removed all of my existing information. I had to set up a new account and re-enter everything. I have no way of accessing account history - thank goodness I didn’t have any unused tickets stored! Functionality has diminished as well. There’s no point in using this now - just buy a ticket at the pier and don’t run the risk of another update deleting your prepaid tickets.

Overall, a pretty good app. Simple, intuitive functionality, and nice looks. However, it used 20MB of my cell data for just buying a ticket, and displaying it twice. That’s excessive. Please reduce cell data use. Not all of us have unlimited plans.

Why is there never an announcement regarding the upcoming docking while on the ferry? Can you put it on the tv screen in the cabin?

Also, NYCFerry is not the most user-friendly app. I find you can’t “go back” to a previous screen but have to start all over.

That’s it. Why do I have to sign in and give my email address. I just want to ride the ferry and know the schedule.

You don’t have to sign in to an app to see where and when the bus is in NYC. You don’t have to sign in to see the subway map and schedule and service updates. I really don’t want or need to be tracked and advertised to. I just want to get across the river.

This option to ride the ferry to work is more than a luxury but a necessity. My knees are shot and I can no longer negotiate the subway stairs. If it wasn’t for the ferry, I may have had to quite my job.

You can take a ferry to many convenient locations throughout the city for the same price as a subway ride, but so much more fun! Plus it’s quick.

The new app doesn’t allow for searches for next day departures so it’s not possible to plan your commute the night before. It also doesn’t allow you to find alternative connections. It doesn’t keep searches or allow for quickly “reversing” a search for your return commute. The old app had all these features. Why could NYC ferry not keep the old app?

I really like that I can see my previous activations and can check the schedule for next days. I do think big brother wants my data as soon as I open NYCFerry but who cares. As long as you helping us out

The where are you going feature could use some improvement as it seems to m not take the existence of the Brooklyn Navy Yard station into account. Other than that, great app.

Takes me couple seconds to get tickets. Super fast and easy once set up. Only if everything worked this well.

App is easy to use, quick and I like using it.
The interface is simple and clean.
Before you can activate a ticket , a message about masks being required pops up.
However the rule is never enforced while on board.
The top deck is filled with selfish idiots who take off their chin masks immediately.
I know the crew and staff are not cops, but if NYCFerry has a message on it, why can’t the same message be announced at each stop and followed up on the actual ferry?

The UI on NYCFerry is very confusing. It is not user friendly whatsoever. The 'schedule' tab crashed on the first use and didn't bring up the scroll menu at the bottom of the screen to choose location. Also the 'stop/address' nomenclature for the my commute tab is confusing. It should say 'start location' and 'stop location'. The store tab is also a strange nomenclature. It should say 'buy tickets' or something more straightforward. I'm not buying a t-shirt, this is not a store, there shouldn't be a basket or a checkout. Just 'buy tickets' and 'purchase' or 'apply'.

The layout is also confusing. I do user testing and QA testing for a living and NYCFerry was poorly developed or not properly tested. This is an app that should be so easy a monkey could use it, and it is not. This is for average people who don't have time to figure out the confusing UI of this new app. I don't want to shop, I don't want an experience, I just want to buy a ticket and get to work.

There is no intuitive way to activate multiple tickets! I know this because when I activated multiple tickets (for myself and two others), none of the employees could easily see how many were activated, so they kept activating more! Overall, they cost me $11 (4 tickets!) extra!

The schedules are unclear and hard to read. Also, if you try to switch stops, NYCFerry will hang on the first stop selected until you quit and reload. There is no way to click on links when an alert sends you to the web browser, which happens during a schedule change. There is no way to send those pages to Safari for an easier browsing experience. Did no one text this at all?

I have twenty years’ experience testing computer software. I have published software for the iPhone and its precursors, the Newton and PalmPilot. I can read ancient Greek, modern Russian, and a little bit of cuneiform Babylonian. I apparently do not have sufficient experience to decipher NYCFerry’s user interface and get it to complete the simple task of telling me when the next ferry leaves from 34th Street to 90th Street. More fundamentally, NYCFerry does not even try to provide the information you actually need: will you be allowed to board a ferry, or is it full and turning away passengers?

I’ve found NYCFerry to be so unreliable. There have been so many times where I’ll open NYCFerry to buy a ticket and then a few minutes later I will open it again to pull up the ticket to get on the ferry and it logs me out. I’ve missed my ferry because of this more than once! Please fix this because it’s SO frustrating!

I use the Ferry for commuting between neighbors and Manhattan ( it’s a good alternative when you know the areas and don’t like the trains ) . It’s a happy feeling traveling when the weather is good.
Trains are a pain in weekends not talking about how crowded they are on the rush hours . NYCFerry doesn’t crash anymore
and GUI is pretty simple , although can be confusing in the beginning.
Schedules are good , payment methods are more than fine ( Apple Pay works very nice )
You can actually chill on the Ferry ( There is a bar and WiFi coming soon )
It will get you point A & B and it’s fast .
Improvements yes
I wish to be one pass for all transit in NYC :)
Definitely an Iwatch app for ticketing !
Better interface/GUI .
Overall works good and does the job .
I’ve been using it for 1year +

Was worried when I saw the other reviews of NYCFerry crashing, but I’ve only had good experiences with it. Easy to find the schedule, I appreciate the map function, and love being able to buy my ticket for the ferry on NYCFerry . I’m not a fancy app developer, just a normal person who appreciates an app that does what I need it to do.

Trying the load and reload the schedule seriously lags which is problematic when you’re rushing to catch a boat that docks much earlier than is scheduled.

They’re notifications should be pushed to my phone rather than NYCFerry because how else am I supposed to know the boats aren’t running Bc of the weather and should plan another route to WORK.

Lastly, there are TWO ways to save tickets??!! That would have been great to know before I had to unexpectedly replace my phone and now cannot access my tickets because they were saved to my old device rather than the cloud—which I would have opted for if I had know this was an OPTION!

And you can’t even communicate these things to them, because there is no direct way to give feedback on NYCFerry , and their customer service is garbage.

Hey Bytemark, hope whatever corrupt relationship you have to the govt to have this contract makes you as rich as you dreamed. As a fellow app developer, I'm utterly appalled at how unbelievably terrible NYCFerry is. You win the award for the absolute worst app ever designed. I have stupid apps made by random developers from God knows where that function at least one order of magnitude better than this. Do you guys even care about the quality of the product you put out? How can you sleep at night knowing you've put this garbage in the world?

While the ferry service itself leaves a lot to be desired, NYCFerry is absolutely fine. All the complaints here are either from spoiled people that only like things that appear/work exactly as they prefer, or people that simply aren’t very clever.

But that seems to be the way the city is going these days, with the influx of self-entitled transplants...

App worked fine. Downloaded it added payment information and bought two tickets. I saw one review that said you could not active more than one ticket at a time but I was able to easily. Boat ride was great!

From a UI standpoint, NYCFerry is unforgivably confusing and just poorly designed. If you’re a first time user, and you downloaded it because you want to get on a ferry that’s approaching the dock, all I can say is Good Luck... nothing is intuitive and you’ll probably miss the boat. You’ll probably activate more than one ticket on your first go-around and enjoy trying to figure out your schedule. I would suggest Hornblower hire a real app design firm... there’s no need for this to be so difficult.

If you look at the schedule it does not list actual departure times for ferries leaving within an hour, instead it counts down the time in minutes (like, leaves in 51 minutes, not leaves at 9:54) which means you have to constantly refresh NYCFerry to see how much time is left. Except to get it to refresh you have to back out of the schedule then go back in it. Stupid. If you just tell me the ACTUAL TIME it leaves I'm perfectly able to figure it out on my own.

I don’t have all the the studies and wisdom of other people who gave negative comments here and just downloaded and figured NYCFerry in two seconds. I guess NYCFerry is too simple for stupid intelligent people.

The point of having NYCFerry is to have a schedule and buy tickets.
But it took too much efforts to figure out the schedule.
It seems they tried the map pointing, but it is very confusing. I think I will need to be an expert at all water ways, and use NYCFerry just buying a ticket.
Wish you could finish it like the old version ny waterway, it was much easier.

It’s been a reliable app in the past. However after the last update it will crash upon startup multiple times. In addition, while NYCFerry is running, you will get logged out of your account. Really annoying when you’re about to board the ferry and you’re frantically trying to restart NYCFerry or re-log back in.