# The Great Courses — user reviews > 247 indexed App Store user reviews of The Great Courses by TEACHING COMPANY, LLC, rated 4.20/5 from 1,303 ratings. - Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/the-great-courses/id636818505/reviews - App overview in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/the-great-courses/id636818505.md - Rating breakdown: 5★ 806 · 4★ 224 · 3★ 84 · 2★ 68 · 1★ 121 ## What do users think of The Great Courses? Overall sentiment: neutral **Pros** - 🚀 Convenient offline access - 🎨 Great course content - 📚 Comprehensive library - 🖥️ Seamless streaming - 🗓️ Saves progress **Cons** - 🐛 Buggy offline functionality - 🔍 Difficult to navigate/search - ⏱️ Slow downloads - 🔌 Requires internet connection - 📱 Suboptimal mobile experience **Commonly reported bugs** - Lectures randomly skip or stop - App crashes when switching between courses - Inconsistent login/authentication issues - Downloaded content disappears - Playback issues when switching devices **Most requested features** - Add Apple TV support - Improve offline playback controls - Implement bookmarking/note-taking - Provide better course organization - Add variable playback speed ## Newest reviews (17 of 247) ### 2/5 — Flawed *2025-06-24, version 8.2.5* The app does not have at least 1 course I purchased, although the purchased course is available on their website. Since it’s unreliable, I cannot recommend it. ### 2/5 — Glitchy *2025-05-28, version 8.2.5* When offline it will work fine for a while then start asking for you to log in again and will not accept the login data until it reconnects to wifi. Will stop a downloaded file midway. Basically not much use in airplane mode. ### 3/5 — I hope you like typing your password! *2025-04-16, version 8.2.5* The great courses is great. The app is mediocre at best, unless you really like logging back in after taking a week or two off. ### 2/5 — No Split Views *2025-03-17, version 8.2.4* Doesn't support basic Split View or pop out video player which makes it difficult to take notes on lectures ### 3/5 — Sorta functional *2025-01-03, version 8.2.4* I use the app often but I never know what it’s going to do. I keep reinstalling it but it keeps coming up with new glitches. ### 4/5 — Off line app poor *2024-12-26, version 8.2.4* I’ve tried to use this app many times while travelling when I don’t have access to wifi to play courses I’ve bought in my library. The app kicks me out of the lectures constantly. Time consuming to re-open and sometimes couldn’t even re-open until I was able to get wifi which can be many hours on a long haul flight. Very frustrating. ### 3/5 — Spyware? *2024-11-01, version 8.2.4* Find it odd that I haven’t used this app in months yet this app consumes more cellular data (2.93gb in the past month) than apps that I regularly use and that is including some audio/video apps. Concerning. ### 3/5 — Car Play? *2024-10-08, version 8.2.4* I’d give this app a higher rating but it is missing the ability to use Apple Car Play. I listen to the lectures mostly when I’m in the car and it would be so much more helpful to be able to play it on Car Play. ### 4/5 — Lost AirPlay Capability *2024-09-25, version 8.2.4* The app and the instructional videos are great, but after upgrading to iPadOS 18, the app lost the ability to use AirPlay to cast to my Apple TV device. ### 3/5 — Great courses but the app is weak *2024-09-15, version 8.2.3* Great Courses has terrific content but the app crashes frequently. Frustrating. ### 3/5 — Great content! Lackluster app. *2024-06-17* I gladly would give the Courses available here 5 stars! They will fascinate you and make you a more interesting, intelligent person. But the app is not worthy of their greatness. The promise of this app is that you can absorb a lot of courses, watching in multiple settings. It’s best feature is that you can switch between video and audio versions of the courses. However it frequently causes me to lose my place. It does not reliably sync with the Apple TV app so I have stopped using that. Also switching between video and audio occasionally restarts the lesson. Also some useful features for a listening app are absent such as a sleep timer or variable speed playback for audio. These are not necessary but the reliable syncing and keeping track of your progress is a must for the experience that this content deserves. Also the search feature oddly doesn’t always return courses that have the search term in the name of the course. ### 2/5 — Poorly done *2024-04-12, version 8.2.3* Generally fairly functional however it has major issues: 1.) recently it won’t keep playing when my iPhone is locked which obviously is a huge problem. 2.) it will sometime play multiple times over top each other and the only way to stop is to kill the app and start it again. ### 2/5 — Does not work well offline *2024-03-12, version 8.2.3* The app works well online but very very often hangs when in my car out of cell phone service. Very frustrating. The app just spins and does nothing ### 2/5 — Terrible app to use offline - coders should be fired! *2023-06-22, version 8.2.3* The coders who made this app should be fired! At least for iPad, totally unusable in offline mode to watch downloaded courses. I used this app on an iPad to download my courses before a flight. When I tried to watch the courses offline on my flight, the app was horrifically unstable and crash nearly 20 times through a single 30 minute lecture. This is all the fault of terrible coding practices by the app developers! Whoever they paid to make this app did a terrible job on the backend code. ### 4/5 — If you have problems, call and talk to someone *2023-05-18, version 8.2.3* I finally took the advice I received in 2 emails and placed a call. The lovely lady helped me by resetting my password, which allowed access to the missing course. She said to use the catalog code for the discount, something you can do easily if Chrome is your browser, but the app doesn’t seem to have that capability. It took at least half an hour to sort things out, but the call was worth that. ### 1/5 — Incompatible with fire tv *2023-03-18, version 8.2.2* The app isn’t available for fire tv but it is for Roku. On fire tv they expect users to pay a monthly subscription fee for a catalog of courses they choose. I want to be able to sign into my account and stream my library using my fireTV and as of now I can’t. Ridiculous. ### 1/5 — Can not download to iPad *2023-03-09, version 8.2.1* Courses can not be downloaded to an iPad or iPhone. So as far as I’m concerned the app is useless. ## Most critical reviews (10 lowest-rated) ### 1/5 — Dr. Wayne Isom *2025-06-20, version 8.2.5* I have purchased over $ 1000 worth of your courses over the years and find it very difficult to stream the courses on my phone. I would need better service to subscribe to your Great Courses plus. I think you will go out of business! Wayne Isom, MD ### 1/5 — Does Not Play Nice with Apple Car Play *2025-04-25, version 8.2.5* Great Courses has made this app even worse. They should fire the people involved. Or maybe they already did, and have just abandoned it. Nothing works. I can’t log in. It don’t let me play downloaded courses without logging in. I don’t want to stream and should not need to log in. Miserable experience. SECOND UPDATE: After spending time with customer service, I learn that the problem is even worse than I thought. The app is not sequencing through the lectures in order because I previously listened to them on the app many months ago. Now the app automatically skips every lecture that it thinks I finished — no matter how long ago — and jumps to the next place it finds that it thinks is incomplete. So I end up jumping from the end of lecture 5 to somewhere in lecture 14. It does not seem to occurto these morons that a customer might want to listen to a lecture series a second time. There is no way to reset the “finished” flag on the lectures in order for auto play to work properly. Deleting and re-downloading the lectures also makes no difference. I just cannot believe how stupid this is. END SECOND UPDATE. // UPDATE: I have lowered the rating to one star. The technical shortcomings are appalling. Most annoying is that it will not sequence through downloaded lectures in order - it jumps randomly. The Great Courses is not so great when it comes to technology. END UPDATE. // One obvious place to listen to these lectures is in the car. Unfortunately, this app does not function properly via Apple Car Play. The “play” button shown on the car’s screen does not do anything. Sometimes there is no audio. Other times, after trying to start playback, two or more out-of-sync instances of the lecture start playing at once. This is really frustrating, and makes this app pretty useless. ### 1/5 — Downloads don’t work *2024-09-09, version 8.2.3* It took a while for Great Courses to support off-line video viewing (on long flights, for example). Problem is it still doesn’t work well, crashing frequently and requiring restarting a course multiple times in short time periods. ### 1/5 — Does Not Play Nice with Apple Car Play *2024-09-04, version 8.2.3* SEVOND UPDATE: After spending time with customer service, I learn that the problem is even worse than I thought. The app is not sequencing through the lectures in order because I previously listened to them on the app many months ago. Now the app automatically skips every lecture that it thinks I finished — no matter how long ago — and jumps to the next place it finds that it thinks is incomplete. So I end up jumping from the end of lecture 5 to somewhere in lecture 14. It does not seem to occurto these morons that a customer might want to listen to a lecture series a second time. There is no way to reset the “finished” flag on the lectures in order for auto play to work properly. Deleting and re-downloading the lectures also makes no difference. I just cannot believe how stupid this is. END SECOND UPDATE. // UPDATE: I have lowered the rating to one star. The technical shortcomings are appalling. Most annoying is that it will not sequence through downloaded lectures in order - it jumps randomly. The Great Courses is not so great when it comes to technology. END UPDATE. // One obvious place to listen to these lectures is in the car. Unfortunately, this app does not function properly via Apple Car Play. The “play” button shown on the car’s screen does not do anything. Sometimes there is no audio. Other times, after trying to start playback, two or more out-of-sync instances of the lecture start playing at once. This is really frustrating, and makes this app pretty useless. ### 1/5 — App has poor feedback on lessons watched, bad chromecast *2024-07-12, version 8.2.3* While we love Great Courses, the app has the following problems. (1) Generally there is no feedback that you have watched one of the lessons. We Chromecast to our TV most of the time. I suspect that the turnover of control to the TV takes the app out of the game. An interrupting phone call, also often leads to trying to find out we we left off. Maybe I need my own button on each session. Seems gross, but if the app can’t track usage, then I need a way. (2) Worse for us who like to ChromeCast the lectures onto our Tv, ChromeCast is failing from the app in many cases. The intro to a class may fail but the rest of the series is okay, others just fail. You can chromecast the same lectures from a PC from the online site if you have a google browser. This is madening! Downgrading the review. And their technical support asks you to wait longer. Years? ### 1/5 — App doesn’t work *2024-01-15, version 8.2.3* Latest app version just won’t load videos - the app is useless. It’s the one and main thing this app is supposed to do and it just gets stuck on the loading video screen. I can look at the professor bios or even download the study guide in the app, but the videos won’t load or stream. I’d recommend Apple remove this from the store as a dead app. Very disappointed I paid for a bunch of courses and can’t watch them. ### 1/5 — Unstable, poorly designed interface *2023-08-03* I have to drive occasionally through a five hour cell coverage dead zone so downloaded several courses to listen to. But the app randomly stops playing, showing up as “unknown” device” or just shutting down; once you plow through the steps to get back to the session, it doesn’t remember the session much less where you were; the selection buttons are minuscule (e.g. you can’t just click on the whole title in the play list but rather it a 1squate millimeter arrow to start playing)( the skip-forward button sometimes turns the app off. As much as I wanted to know more about Charlemagne, I gave up after ten attempts to listen to one lesson and listened to music. Worst app I’ve seen, and the great content Great Courses offers deserves better than a Windows 3.1 level experience. Get your act together, folks! **Developer response:** Hi there, please contact us at CustomerService@TheGreatCourses.com or call us at 1-800-832-2412 and one of our team members will be able to help you with this issue. ### 1/5 — Unusable *2023-07-29, version 8.2.3* I am already using the Roku app, but when I tried to use the app from the App Store it refuses to let me sign in. I don’t remember setting up the account, but when I initially tried I got an error message “user with e-mail already exists…” or something similar. So, I tried to use “forgot password”, but only get a different error message. It’s probably just as well, as the Roku app is $7 a month. From I can tell, to access a course like “Biblical Hebrew” it’s $340, with the only additional benefit of being able to download the PDF coursebook, which is why I was interested in the app for my iPad. Even if I could afford the $340 it’s impossible to complete the transaction if your app is busted. That’s pretty inexcusable for a 4 year old app, in my opinion. ### 1/5 — Yikes, this is awful! I can’t believe it’s rated 4+!! *2023-04-18, version 8.2.3* I’m baffled by the positive ratings. I wasn’t expecting the app to be as slick as Netflix, but it’s the worst online video learning app I have tried. It’s about as bad as WestLegalEdcenter’s audio-only continuing legal education app, which is to be expected since the audience for that content is so small and shouldn’t be playing Tetris while taking a course for CLE credit. While it seems this app was updated 2 weeks ago for a “new crash diagnostic code,” it’s clear that the app’s features haven’t been updated in many years or the people developing it haven’t kept up with the state of the art in online learning or even basic features of Netflix 5 years ago. As an example, what is the point of a picture-in-picture feature if the video & audio stop if you try to open another app? That might make sense for continuing education courses for credit, but I’m talking about a course on dog training! (May explain why some people have commented that they prefer accessing content through iTunes) Also, why are downloads so slow and why isn’t there an option to download an entire course (all videos at once, instead of individually)? As just one comparison, the Udemy app isn’t great, but PiP works and you have the option to download individual segments or the entire course. These are just two examples. I’ve noticed that many other reviewers have bulleted their issues with the app and what’s apparent is that no one is paying attention to the feedback. The only reason I’m writing this review is to add my voice to the chorus to help lower the unreasonably high rating so that Great Courses starts to pay attention, if not to us, to their competition! ### 1/5 — The worst app ever. *2023-03-26, version 8.2.2* I can’t get the courses I’ve bought to download or even to play via WiFi. I’ve tried to deal with the company and they were useless. They have always had great courses but without being able to listen to them means I’ve just wasted my money. They take zero responsibility for the uselessness of what they offer. ## Most praised reviews (10 highest-rated) ### 5/5 — Great content, lousy streaming model: no Apple TV for bought courses. *2024-11-10, version 8.2.4* Forcing TGC buyers to use a subscription (TGC Plus, exWondrium) is just a money grub. Fix it. ### 5/5 — Excellent app but please add to Apple TV *2024-08-10, version 8.2.3* We really enjoy The Great Courses (iOS) and have purchased many of them as supplemental teaching aides. However, I wish that The Teaching Company would add this app to tvOS for the Apple TV (as it did for Roku and others); at this point, our 4K Apple TVs, which we use regularly, only offer The Great Courses Plus, which only delivers streaming access for that particular premium service (not access to purchased courses). ### 5/5 — No longer works on my IPhone so I cannot access my courses. . *2023-05-27, version 8.2.3* No longer works in my iPhone. Correction: my VPN was creating the problem. After a tech call to Apple we fixed the problem by turning off the VPN and then turning it back on. ### 5/5 — Downloads are working offline *2022-10-31, version 8.1.2* I reported you could not watch downloaded videos, it appears to be working now. I can't delete my review so I updated it. ### 5/5 — Great service! *2021-11-08, version 6.1* The app works really well.it is updated periodically and it is easy to use. I love how easy is to switch from video to audio streaming whenever you want to save data. You can this “on the fly”. Content is awesome. You can airplay the content on any device but they do not have an app for tvOS.Please, TGC co make an app for Apple TV. It may be also helpful to make your apps working with Apple CarPlay OS. Thank you for keeping this service alive! ### 5/5 — Special request *2018-12-18, version 5.4* Hi Guys, Love the great courses and the app, My LG smart tv has lots of apps that allow you to stream straight to your tv. Can you guys please look at doing an app for popular tv brands. Thanks Dave ### 5/5 — Great courses *2018-12-07, version 5.4* I can fully endorse Robert Solomon’s courses if u are interested in self education. ### 5/5 — Grateful *2018-11-25, version 5.4* Thank you for providing me with the ability to continue learning. It has helped me understand and connect with the world around me. It has renewed my sense of purpose and increased my ambition to excel. It has also given me more pleasure and joy in my life! ### 5/5 — Bravo. *2018-10-08, version 5.4* I have 32 of these courses and love them dearly. I listen while driving long distances and while I take my daily walks. Great learning experience. ### 5/5 — Great Trials *2018-10-01, version 5.4* Amazingly great! I am 77 and was alive for some of these trials, but was totally naive and unaware of their importance. I was teaching kids in 5th grade many of the falsehoods in our American texts, and nothing about what was really going on in their world. This course has made a difference in my next actions. I will work to share more of the strange, awful, and noble things things trials bring to our reality today. --- *Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-06-10.*