The Vivino app is amazing for its primary feature: using your cell phone’s camera, you photograph a wine label and Vivino quickly reports back reviews, typical prices and more. It’s indispensable when shopping for wine and confronted with a bevy of bottled beauties, and the tech is an elegant marriage of image search and wine data. But unfortunately, that’s about it.
Vivino promises a lot more, but the dev team seems woefully ill-equipped to deliver. Months ago, users of both the app and even the webpage had been tortured for weeks with a site error that crippled most features, and about which Vivino had been relatively silent. The fact that both the app and webpage were impacted revealed a serious multi-platform database issue, which then raised questions about the security of user information. Emails to their support team routinely went unanswered.
In what could have been a good move to simultaneously boost user loyalty, while obtaining feedback on potential new features, Vivino recently sent an email survey with the subject line “Help to build the next feature?” Unfortunately, the title of the survey was misleading, and the devs were not interested at all in getting user opinions on what might be the “next feature,” but instead asked some fairly inane and canned questions about whether app users preferred to see words like “fruity” or “dry” used when describing wines. There was no comment field option at all which may have allowed survey respondents to suggest their own features, so it is clear the dev team already had their minds made up about something, and the survey was designed to reinforce their assumptions.
Waiter, There’s a Bug in My Wine App
Meanwhile, the other features the app provides are poorly implemented. For the “premium” price of $49.99, you are supposed to get periodic buying guides, but these routinely include wines that are only available for sale on the other side of the planet from where you live, making the buying guide entirely useless. A GPS feature is supposed to report nearby wines, but routinely fails to show any wines at all, even if you are standing in the middle of a wine shop.
Worse still, Vivino hasn’t fixed growing problems with its key feature, the label scans. More and more, a scan will result in a wildly different wine; scan a sauvignon blanc from New Zealand, and it may come back with the right label image, but the data is for a malbec from Argentina. Other times, it gets the winery right, but the wrong wine or wrong vintage. The app allows you to correct the year or the particular wine from that producer, but if the result was for an entirely different wine from an entirely different label, you’re out of luck. This problem used to occur occasionally, but recently has become more frequent, occurring (for me, anyway) about 25% of the time. Given that there are a host of “wine scanning” apps coming out, Vivino needs to course-correct, and do it soon.
Syncing of the data across platforms isn’t seamless, either. I run Vivino on three devices (a tablet, a PC and my cell phone) and often reviews I post on one platform don’t show up on the other for weeks. Accessing via PC through Chrome seems to show everything in real time, but for the tablet and cell, it’s hit or miss as to when the data will sync up.
Antisocial Media
But perhaps the biggest frustration with Vivino is that it is sitting on a goldmine that seems to be beyond their ability to comprehend: creating a true wine-based social network. Right now users can upload reviews and ratings, and can “follow” others; but that’s about it. You can comment on other people’s reviews, but you can’t message people, you can’t share reviews with your friends, can’t share your social media accounts, and there is very little user interaction as a result. In short, there’s no community.
There’s also some secret algorithm that chooses to nominate some reviewers as “featured” which puts their reviews front and center; in fact, it’s likely not an algorithm at all, and just a toggle punched on the whim of a developer somewhere. There’s no rhyme or reason to who gets “featured” and how they got that way, and it cripples the ability of anyone — such as Winepisser — to build a “brand” through the app. It’s impossible to build a network of readers, or even friends, no matter how much time you put in on the app; since reviewers ultimately want their reviews read — that’s the point — this undercooked attempt at networking is a big, glaring flaw.
There’s little you can do about it, either, since Vivino offers no integration with other social media outlets. You cannot, for example, easily post links to long-form reviews on the web, and you can’t back-share your Vivino reviews on your site, either. There’s no Twitter integration either, which is a cardinal sin; I would love to automatically tweet links to my Vivino reviews, and I am sure Vivino would love the additional traffic. But the devs don’t seem to know they should even want such traffic. This, then, limits the reciprocation Vivino could get by having “big name” reviewers constantly promoting them in return.
I’m patient, though. I really like the scan feature, and reviewing wines is fun and easy, even if no one will ever be able to see the reviews. I hope Vivino comes to its senses, though, and turns the app into a functioning social review platform like Travelocity, but for winos.
Grab the app here from the Apple Store, and here from Google Play.