CAD Services: AutoCAD Mobile – Too Many Complaints

AutoCAD 360 is the official AutoCAD® mobile app. Available for Android as well as Apple phones, its earlier versions were called AutoCAD WS. Seeing it in the news and being in the CAD services business, we were of course curious and decided to download it.

We were immediately faced with a disincentive for the download. The app wanted to read our contacts list! As a policy we avoid using apps which want to pry into our contacts. In our opinion this is just so that they can get hold of more names and email addresses for them to market to. As far as we are concerned, our contact list is PRIVATE, and we despise apps that presume we are shallow enough to make it public.

We did have a Galaxy Tab with a minimal contacts list on it, so we decided to download AutoCAD 360 into it.

That done, we launched the app. The welcome screen showed several sample drawing icons and we clicked one. We were impressed by what came up:

Nice, we thought… but then we noticed something that made us decide to not use the app. It was the latest reviews on the app page on Google Play.

The app summary was:

Not bad on the face of it, but then we read the first review, which said:

David Wellner – June 3, 2013 – Version 2.0.1

Disappointed

This software is missing so much for the editing in the mechanical side of things. No options for array on a bolt circle. Cant filet a corner. These are simple things to this software and its not included? Shouldn’t charge monthly fees to use this untill its fully equipped.

We moved on to the second, which said:

“uya T – May 30, 2013 – Version 2.0.1

Not everyone on the planet wants to hold their data online

I strongly disagree with applications that insist on having an online connection just to be able to function. I also disagree with having to login just to use an app. Have you never been working on something offline and local???? When your much beloved cloud crashes – and they do – you will not be able to function.

To avoid telling a long story, out of the ten most recent reviews, seven were strong complaints (one even called the app a scam).

Sure, AutoCAD 360 has 15, 479 reviews, but in our book it is the most recent reviews which are a true index of customer opinion, since these reviews deal with the most recent version of the app.

Conclusion

Autodesk, Inc. has tried hard to bring AutoCAD into the mandatory mobile world with AutoCAD 360, but the product is not usable in its present state. Autodesk merely has to read the most recent reviews in Google Play and fix the problems described to give the app the excellence of its desktop version.

Let me close by reminding you that TMG is a CAD services expert, and that if you have a need to outsource any of your CAD work, ask us for a quote and be pleasantly surprised. To do this, jump to our CAD services page without further ado!

Warm regards,