Android App Review - Tango Text, Voice, and Video by Tango

Android App Review - Tango Text, Voice, and Video by Tango

Tango Text, Voice, and Video by Tango. Well, this is quite embarrassing since Tango is no doubt one of the most popular chat and video conferencing apps for Android smartphones. Nevertheless, though no doubt millions of people have downloaded it and installed it and it does have a 4.4 score on Google Play, we didn't like it. 

It didn't work for us. Maybe its our carrier, or the quality of the internet here or whatever, but we kept getting interrupted calls, we kept failing to communicate with our contacts and we kept getting irritated by this app.

The irritating message in the notification bar that you have to update the app and it won't go away till you perform the update ... very irritating! The difficulty in setting up and managing user accounts ... 

In conclusion, most of our testers didn't like it. Too complicated, it never seemed to work properly even on brand Samsung smartphones and we didn't like several interface decisions the programmers made. 

• Score: Our own very subjective score - 3.5. The app has various problems and has some very irritating features. We know a lot of people like it very much, we just had a bad experience with it.
• Description: This is a video chat, instant messaging and communications app that allows the user to communicate with his or her contacts by various ways - the user can send a text message, a video message or a voice recording. The app is fairly sophisticated and can be used over tablets (unlike Whatsapp Messenger, for instance) and it also has a lot of clever features like informing the user when a familiar contact installs the app, allowing forming and communicating with groups and even informing the user when a new version becomes available. The interface is also very slick and follows the smartphone interface when Tango calls are coming in, ringing etc.
• Good Points: Video, voice and test messaging free over the internet (of course, using the smartphone's data plan), A nice interface ringing when a new call is incoming, a lot of sophisticated features, Works across tablets, smartphones and even PCs (haven't test the PC version, yet).
• Bad Points: Setting up and managing users - though supposed to be simple was very complicated and required frequent tinkering to hook the right email account with the right Tango user. When an update is available, Tango informs the user by an icon in the notification bar WHICH STAYS THERE UNTIL THE USER PERFORMS THE UPDATE! We found that very annoying! Okay, we saw an update was available, we'll update when we can, now clear the notification bar! Last and not least bad point was the fact we consistently failed in making calls. During our tests, running from several brand phones and tablets (notably, Samsung galaxy phones and Acer tablets) calls and video chatting were frequently interrupted.
• Experience: Installing the app was easy and eventless though the app has a significant footprint (several tens of megabytes) but then the problems started with configuring the Tango users and attaching them to the right email users. After this mess got sorted out, more or less, we started using the app and then we encountered all sorts of problem when trying to conduct long distance video and text calls. There were so much interruptions and disconnects that the testers were forced to stop their testing and resume them later. We understand long distance calls may be problematic but there are ways to handle these things by reducing frame rate etc. This app simply did not behave well in this regard though short distance calls usually were smoother.
• Longevity: None of our testers were enthusiastic about this app and most uninstalled it after our testing was done.
• Google Play Link - Tango Text, Voice, and Video by Tango
• Google Play Score: 4.4