What's new in Crew 4.1
Reply to messages in chat, a travel agent that recommends real places and answers in seconds, and invites that drop you straight into the trip.
Update · Tyler · · 3 min read
4.1 is out. Here's what changed, in a bit more detail than the App Store gives you.
Reply to a message
Swipe right on any message in the group chat and it goes into your reply, quoted above whatever you type. It's in the long press menu too.
Once a chat gets busy it stops being obvious who is answering what, and that's the trip chat most of the time. Three plans and a payment question in the same ten minutes.
The travel agent knows real places now
Ask it where to eat and you used to get four names with details it had made up. The rating, the price, the neighbourhood, all plausible and none of it checked.
Every fact on those cards is real now. The photo, the rating, the price range, the hours, the address. It still picks the places, because choosing four spots that suit your particular group on your particular weekend is the part it's genuinely good at. It just stopped inventing the rest.
Tap a card and you get the whole thing, with a button to drop it onto your itinerary.
It's also a lot faster. A question that took the best part of a minute comes back in a few seconds.
And the travel agent is in the group chat
Everyone in the trip sees what everyone else asked it and what it said back, as it happens. Other people's questions sit on the left like any other message, and the agent has its own face in the thread.
It answers one question at a time. If someone got in ahead of you, you'll see where you are in the queue and you can pull your question back out if you change your mind.
Chat opens where it should
Small thing, constant annoyance. Opening a chat used to put you somewhere in the middle and then jump, and a short conversation got pushed to the bottom of the screen with a gap above it.
It opens on the newest message now. A short thread sits at the top where you'd expect it.
Pinch to zoom, properly
In chat and in the gallery. It's the real thing now, the one you already know from Photos: pinch anywhere, double tap to zoom in on the spot you tapped, and it stays where you put it instead of snapping back to the middle.
Invites put you in the trip
Tapping an invite used to be two loading screens, and if you'd already joined that trip it could hand you an error instead. That's the first thing a lot of people ever see of Crew, so it was a bad place to be rough.
One screen now, and it lands you in the trip. Opening a link you've already accepted does what you'd expect rather than failing.
Trips that don't have dates yet
Plenty of trips are a group and a vague month before they're anything else. A trip with no dates used to get stamped with today's, which is nobody's trip. That stopped.
You can also clear dates once you've set them, which you couldn't before. And the prompt asking for them is a slim line above your events now instead of something that takes over the screen.
Signing up
Worth a mention because it's the part everyone sees once and then never again. Your phone number spaces itself out as you type, the keyboard stops shoving the screen around, and the steps all move in one direction instead of three.
Then the usual pile of smaller ones. Swiping back to go back works on the screens where it used to fight with whatever scrolled sideways. Tapping a pin on the map opens the place rather than a blank sheet the first time. Faces load in a few more spots that were showing initials. A trip nobody picked a colour for is white rather than beige.
If something in here isn't right, there's a Feedback item in the menu and it comes straight to me.