Posted lets you track your packages and receive notifications of their progress towards delivery. It is very simple to use. To track a package, you touch the “Add Delivery” button, select your country and service provider and then enter a description and tracking number.
For this review, I only tested the US tracking options. However, the application allows the user to track packages for many domestic couriers based in 12 different countries as well as some International couriers.
The main screen for the app, presents a list of all of the packages you are tracking. Each entry has an easy to decipher icon displaying the status: a Truck for packages in progress, a Green Checkmark for delivered items and a “?” for a newly added package which it doesn’t know anything about yet. Along with the icon is some text describing the package, including: User-Specified Description, Courier Name, Current Status, and Last Update Timestamp.
To get more details for any package, just touch the arrow icon on the entry and you will see the detailed tracking history for the package, as well as links to either view the current location on a map, or to view the courier’s tracking website for the package. Both of these links are opened within the app and do not require launching the mobile Safari browser. If you want push or badge notifications of your packages’ progress, this is enabled via the iOS Settings->Notifications menu. You will receive an alert every time the status of one of your packages changes.
One aspect of Posted that I found particularly useful was the ability to start tracking a package even before it is in the courier’s online system. In the past I’ve found it annoying that some shippers don’t allow you to start tracking a package immediately from their website. Sometimes there can be a delay, and in the meantime you might misplace the tracking number while waiting for the shipper’s system to catch up. Posted eliminates this issue and you can start the tracking as soon as you get your tracking number. And should you want/need to check something on the shipper’s site later, there’s a direct link right there at your fingertips.
That being said, there were a few issues with Posted that did cause me a bit of grief. First off, you always need to select your country before entering a package (and USA is at the bottom). It would be nice to have an option to use the iPhone’s location services to figure out where you are, eliminating the need to enter this each time. In a similar vein, you also have to select the courier each time as well. The developer should take a look at what google is doing and figure out a way to have the app auto-detect the courier from the format of the provided tracking number, while obviously allowing the user to override it if it auto-detects incorrectly. I didn’t find the view on map feature to be of much use, in particular, the UPS map was so low-level that it was difficult to gauge the distance. I’ve also experienced an issue with USPS packages where it doesn’t seem to parse the state correctly, so it says location unknown. Although, with regards to this, I’d like to see the developer add some errror checking of the tracking number if it is not yet in courier’s system. To make sure the unrecognized number wasn’t mistyped, the user could be prompted to double-check it and say they want it added anyways.
The notifications of package status changes arrived in a timely manner, always keeping me informed. While very useful, they only seemed to work when the app was open or backgrounded (for those running iOS4.x w/ multitasking support). Also these are all or none, it will notify you of every status change, which can be a lot! It would be better if the app allowed you to opt out of unwanted notifications, for instance, notify me only on ‘delivery’ and ‘exceptions’ instead of every status change. Finally there doesn’t seem to be a logical order to the package list, requiring you to scroll to see if some are still not delivered. This could easily be corrected by adding some sorting options like ‘sort by date’, ‘sort by status’ and ‘sort by courier’.
In Conclusion
I highly recommend this app, as it is the easiest and most useful package tracking app I have tried. It is simple and straightforward and the developer seems to be actively working on improvements. I gave Posted a rating of ‘Good’ since the basic functionality is quite useful. I hope that with a couple of revisions to the app, I will be able to amend this review and raise that score even higher.
A lite version of Posted is available for those who wish to evaluate this app, however it is ad-supported and limits you to tracking three packages in total. If you need to evaluate more than that, you would need to remove and reinstall the app.
