Arbor Parent App User Reviews

Customer Experience

Positive experience2.2% of reviews
Neutral2.2% of reviews
Negative experience95.5% of reviews

~ Based on 267 written reviews from the US App Store.

What users say

Is Arbor Parent App Safe?

Not enough ratings yet to assess Arbor Parent App.

Is Arbor Parent App Legit?

Arbor Parent App appears to be a legitimate app. AppsHunter Legitimacy Score for Arbor Parent App is 80/100.

Based on 80 of 100 points across 7 verification signals from App Store and developer data.

Top reviews

God Awful

To be fair it’s better than the web version which borders on unusable, but the litany of issues here are too numerous to list. Why do you default parents to non emergency contacts and not eligible to pickup the child?
The app is laggy and buggy, drop downs don’t work properly and refreshing issues undoes stuff you’ve filled in.
I’m also suspicious of some of the things they try to encourage you to fill in like parents NI numbers and dates of birth- why do you need this and where is that data going?
Finally the update this evening… background updates to keep the app running smoothly. You’ve broken it. Can no longer log in and Face ID doesn’t work either… I mean, I am dreading having this as the central hub for my child’s school life currently.
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Temu version of school ping

Absolutely shocking since my children’s school switched from school ping to arbor. Notifications stop working all the time, messages have no subjects and there’s no search option to track old messages. The school used to send out regular ‘pings’ on the previous app - often sending last minute reminders a day or 2 before school events. Now you have to manually search and trawl through previous notices in the arbor and the app is just so messy in navigating through the menus.

I receive carbon copy’s of generic messages due to having 2 children. A complete waste. Do not recommend but the school have looked to save money by using a cheaper version.
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I’m spiteful

It isn’t that bad but i got made to change my password three times and now im annoyed

App is usable

But login experience is terrible.
Feels like devs never tried to login into own app.

Terrible

You rarely come across apps this badly coded nowadays thankfully.
Clunky interface - tick
Date entry poor - tick
Random errors - tick

If your school gets this cheap you have my sympathy, there’s no way anyone would pay money for this in the real world

Slow password reset functionality

Been in to make a change. My password (which is saved in my app) is not recognised. I press reset. Still waiting got the email to come through over 5 min later (and not in junk).

Terrible App

Very poor usability and design. Forced on us by the school so of course we have no choice. Password resets are particularly difficult.

If you are a school leader please read

This app is the perfect way to demonstrate the contempt you hold for your students, parents, guardians and the community in general. Some of the functionality, like not being able to reply to messages, is ground breaking. Although to enjoy that functionality you will need to be able to log in, which certainly doesn’t seem possible on iOS…
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Can’t change password

Horrible app, you’re forced to change password every so often, trouble is the new password and confirm password fields get hidden behind the on screen keyboard, when you try scrolling down as soon as you click in one of the fields the keyboard displays hiding the fields, rubbish design and it hasn’t been fixed for years. Also when using large text it does not display everything correctly, it’s not accessible, very bad overall but forced to use it by the school.
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Making life harder with one app

How has this become an App to use for schools? It’s clunky, hard to use and general not user friendly.
When trying to book after school care it’s impossible to see what dates are fully booked / unavailable.

There are approximately 13 steps on this hellish app to book after-school care. If booking multiple dates you get told after the last step that ‘some’ of the dates are unavailable. To see which dates are unavailable you then have to go back to step three which displays a block of dates including dates you’ve previously booked.

Once a booking is made, there is no option to change the date or cancel the booking. You have to go back through the school to request the cancellation. You have to add the new date yourself.

You have to wonder who was involved with the decision process to implement this in schools.
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Frustrating

This could be a great app but it never ever remembers my password and every time I log in I have to reset my password

Two schools attached, blocks your password

Yet again, my password is incorrect (saved in keychain so no it’s not) because two schools attached to my son. School blame Arbor, Arbor blame the school. Nobody wants to actually sort it out though.

App useless

Can never log in on the app. Always locks me out but absolutely fine when logging in on the website

Terrible to use

This app is awful if you have more than one child.

Maryanne

Worst app! Can’t log in and says my password is incorrect and when I change it still says it’s wrong. Sort this out.

How can you get the basics so wrong

You can’t even log in using the password on your iOS keychain. TEST your product.

Issues downloading

Ok for most part, but couldn’t share the exam timetable with my partner or even just to print it. Ended up screenshotting :(

Could improve

The app its not that bad. But can have improvements. Hope the app CEO’s are reading this :)
Firstly, very useful tool for parents would be swapping funds between the children. Otherwise i have to contact school and then school has to contact Arbor help line. Extra work for many people. Plus i have to sit and wait, when school has had time to do it, might take two days or so.
Secondly, simple confirmation email on anything that has been booked on the app would help massively. Its impossible to find what has been booked, what events coming up, etc.
simple but quiet necessary for us parents.
Cheers.
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So bad

Poor design. Not very user friendly. Presents the wrong information about our sons registration for clubs which means we can’t trust or rely on the information and have to set up a second diary resource to know what we’ve booked (for example if we book a tea time club session for 1h it will only ever show the full 2h session).
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Frustrating to use

The app is laid out in a confusing way and takes way too many clicks to do simple things.

For some reason it doesn’t work with Apple’s native Passwords password manager which means I need to copy and paste my (strong) password every time.

I don’t understand why with only one child at one school, I have to select the school every time I log in.

Sorry but it’s the worst app on my phone right now.
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