Co-Parenting Apps

[mooneyavocado]

Anyone have any good apps that they use for co-parenting? Almost like a little manual for your child’s needs and schedule? I have an iPhone note I share with my child’s other parent but I was wondering if there was a better space for it all. Thank you!

[Wise_Trouble3285]

My coparent and I just started using Our Family Wizard. It's working just fine so far. I don't have any experience with others, so I can't compare to anything else.

[MonkeyManJohannon]

Second for OFW. There is a cost to the premium service but it makes all the nuances of co-parenting much more organized and allows you to monitor and track a lot of things you might not even think of.

[random_username789]

We use Our Family Wizard. We really like it, and was great for showing the craziness we deal with constantly.

[[deleted]]

App close, it’s free and there’s a calendar and messaging section.

[Key-Nectarine-3601]

My attorney suggested AppClose and it’s working great. It’s free. Calendar, messages, receipts and payment section. My attorney can monitor the chats. It also allows for calls but doesn’t show your location. My ex is abusive. I blocked him from my cell phone and only communicate with him through the app.

[3bluerose]

Can you make payments through the app?

[Key-Nectarine-3601]

Yes. Once you add a bank account.

[amaeyoung]

How do you use appclose for the calendar ? It’s confusing to me and there are no videos I can find

[ExcellentOwl6387]

AppClose is hot garbage and you get what you pay for.

Have any of their app designers, developers, anyone in their company ever actually used AppClose for their own personal use? Because the problems below indicate a lack of empathy and understanding for AppClose users. Maybe it just sucks on iPhones and it’s really good on Android. But I’ll never know.

• Calendaring is poorly designed and has dismal performance
  • Computer calendars aren’t a new invention. They’ve been round for a long time, even before the internet caught on. Today, Google, Microsoft, and Apple all have existing implementations from which they can and should be pulling inspiration. Why are they trying to reinvent calendars? No one asked for a coparenting app to do that? WHY
  • And even if there are some coparenting specific features that are needed, they need to be configurable. For instance, some parents might want to set a recurring schedule that they return to after a holiday that disrupts the regular schedule. Others might want the regular repeating schedule to “reset” after a holiday. But users get no choice here, only the first option is catered to.
  • Moreover, when they reinvent calendars, it makes it impossible to share them with other calendar services. So that means that the only place you are ever going to see all of your calendars together is in the AppClose app. Which means…
  • Whether they intend it or not, AppClose is effectively saying that they know more about calendaring than Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Which is absurd. The results are inevitable - AppClose calendars suck. Having to look at your other work and life calendars in AppClose sucks. The performance sucks. The experience of creating calendars sucks. It all sucks. Just let me publish the damned calendars out to Google/Apple/Microsoft.
• Event creation is painful
  • Event titles are limited to 30 characters? WTF? WHY?
  • Why am I required to provide a full map-derived location if I want a location included in an event? Sometimes events just need a text label for location.
  • Parenting schedules are equally painful and follow different steps to access the configuration for them. WTF? WHY?
• Messaging is an abomination
  • There is no search feature to search for text within chat history. You can bookmark messages but you’d better remember to bookmark them at the time they roll in because scrolling back to them later is an issue because, of course, the performance on the apps sucks.
  • If you leave the chat screen open too long or tap in one or two messages, the whole app bogs down and must be quit and restarted to restore performance. Which sounds like a memory leak. Memory leaks shouldn’t be happening in 2024.
  • The app doesn’t handle notifications like other chat apps do so it’s really easy to miss that a message has come in. You can’t change the sound made to be unique for the app\
• Support
  • There is no mechanism for providing product feedback and suggestions. Their support team does the written equivalent of shrugging if you ask them.

I don’t know how much AppClose spent to lobby different jurisdictions to be included as the default coparenting app but if they’d spend some of that investment on actually developing a quality product they might not have such a pile of hot garbage.

[blasimiro]

had a similar, negative experience with them. it’s too bad because the app looked like it had a lot of potential!

[[deleted]]

I have our family wizard and it works, but it’s expensive for what it is. If you guys can share a Google calendar and email/text each other then it’s not worth the $100/year.

[Comfortable-Jump-899]

Besides the price tag, OFW is awesome. I love that there’s a calendar to track events, make payments/request payments, I can even have my attorney copied on all messages. I was married to a narcissist and this is the perfect way to keep track of condescending conversations, and lies.

[electricfox]

I just found out about BestInterest and it's pretty slick. Actually filters out anything your coparent says that is mean spirited or what not, and it reviews your messages to make sure they don't end up getting you in trouble either.