Best Buy App So Slow? 305 Reviews Explain Why (2026)

A shopping app that heats your phone is telling you something. It is not sitting still while you scroll. It is working, and the work is not the work you asked for.

My latest pro iPhone never gets hot… unless I’m using this app. It’s obviously extremely resource intensive and poorly optimized.

Every time I open this app and try to search for an item it absolutely heats my phone up to unsafe temperatures. Whats going on here? What data are you pulling and why is a simple search using so much power and creating so much heat?

Those are two different iPhone owners describing the same physical symptom in the same month. We read 305 recent 1-3 star reviews of the Best Buy app across Google Play and the App Store to find out how common that is, and what else people are running into. The answer is unusually lopsided: more than half of every complaint in the set is about one thing, and it is the same thing on both platforms.

How We Counted

On 11 August 2026 we pulled the 500 newest US Google Play reviews and the 500 newest US App Store reviews for the Best Buy app, plus a sweep of five more storefronts (Canada, the UK, and the Spanish-language listings for the US and Mexico). After removing duplicates and reviews too short to categorise, 305 complaints remained: 117 from US Google Play, 14 from the Spanish-language Play sweep and 174 from the App Store.

The rating split was 222 one star, 46 two star and 37 three star, so roughly seven in ten people who wrote something were at the bottom of the scale. The Google Play window is tight, 20 July to 10 August 2026, because this app collects reviews quickly. The Spanish-language sweep reaches further back, to June 2025, and we say so rather than presenting it as part of the same three-week window.

Sorted by what each review is actually about:

One note on that table before we go further. Search barely registers as its own category, and that is not because search works. Nearly every search complaint in this set is a complaint about how long search takes, so it was counted as a speed problem. The same is true of filters, product comparison and the cart.

One Complaint, Two App Stores, Two Different Ratings

173 of 305 reviews, 56.7%, are about the app being slow, freezing, or heating the phone. Split by store, that is 86 from the App Store and 87 from Google Play: an almost perfect halving. Within it, 123 reviews use the language of slowness, 45 describe a freeze, a stall or a crash, and 14 mention heat or battery drain.

That split is the finding. These two audiences are on different operating systems, different hardware, different codebases in all likelihood, and they filed the same complaint in the same proportion. A handful of reviewers noticed it themselves:

First off this app is a terrible experience on android and iOS. Very buggy and sluggish, so much so that I feel that I’m on dial up.

I wonder if the iOS version is this bad. You'd think they'd want their app to function so people could use it to spend money.

Which raises the obvious question about the star ratings. The App Store shows 4.87 and Google Play shows 4.66, and one reviewer put it bluntly:

This APP has a 4.9 rating, how? This APP has to be the worst app in the history of apps.

Here is the unglamorous answer, and it applies to every large app you will ever look up. Both stores show a lifetime average. The App Store listing carries 1,710,677 ratings. A wave of angry reviews arriving over six weeks is a rounding error against a denominator that size, no matter how bad the six weeks were. A high star rating on a very old, very popular app tells you what people thought over the last decade. It does not tell you what the app did this morning. That is the whole reason we read the recent text instead of the number.

The Reviewers Ruled Out Their Own Phones First

Anyone who has contacted an app support desk knows the script: clear the cache, reinstall, check your connection, update your OS. What makes this set unusual is how many people arrived having already done all of it, and said so before anyone asked.

39 of the 305 reviews name a specific device or connection, almost always the newest hardware the reviewer owns, and almost always to pre-empt the reply they expect:

on an iPhone 17 Pro, so I know the performance of the app isn’t due to my hardware.

I've got an s25 Ultra so I know it's not a hardware issue. The app becomes unresponsive after every click

I have a Google pixel 10 pro, so I can't blame the phone.

app is extremely slow on my Fold 7. it takes 30 seconds to recognize touch inputs.

Apps updated, iOS software updated, cache cleared, background tasked disabled, 4 bars of 5G UW, tested both indoors and out.

17 reviews describe their own troubleshooting: reinstalls, cache clearing, phone restarts, factory-fresh installs. One of them adds a detail that no support script has an answer for:

I’ve uninstalled the app and reinstalled and it didn’t change anything. Even the employees at Best Buy admit the app is incredibly slow all the time for them.

And one review in the set comes from inside the building:

I work for Best Buy, have for a long time now. I am not exaggerating when I say that no app on my phone has more bugs and a worse UI than this.

It takes me 10+ minutes just to help a client find something on the app because it's so slow and glitchy.

We cannot verify that the author works for Best Buy, and we are not treating it as insider testimony. It is quoted because the described situation, an employee unable to look something up quickly in front of a customer, matches a lot of the shopper reviews around it.

What "Slow" Means Here, In Seconds

Vague complaints are easy to dismiss. Plenty of these are not vague. Reviewers put numbers on it:

Every tap takes 15+ seconds to load, product images may or may not appear or the app just gets stuck in a spinning wheel.

App has to 'think' for ten seconds after each individual filter option. So if choosing several different filter choices it'll take minutes before I can get to the results.

Doing a simple search input without any filtering or sorting just displays the skeleton loading pattern, only after maybe a minute does the app display any data.

That middle one is the most useful of the three, because filtering is where a shopping app either earns its place or loses to the browser. If each filter tap costs ten seconds, then narrowing a TV search by size, panel type and price is a minute of waiting before you see anything, and you have not even started comparing.

The Spanish-language reviews describe the same experience and reach further back in time, which is worth noting: this is not a complaint that appeared with one bad build in July.

Spanish

La app mas lenta y mal desarrollada que existe, es imposible navegar ni explorar articulos, esta congelada todo el tiempo, super lenta.

Spanish

es la aplicación más lenta,y frizada que puedes conseguir no entiendo cómo una marca tan grande puede tener este tipo de app parece del siglo pasado

Spanish

alguna vez los desarrolladores de Best Buy App alguna vez han escuchado la palabra optimizacion? la app esta igual de horrible que hace 4 años.

The Heat, and What It Implies

Fourteen reviews mention the phone getting hot or the battery draining. That is a small cluster, but it is the most diagnostic one in the whole set, because heat is not a feeling. Heat is work.

After a few minutes of browsing the app inevitably stops loading, begins overheating your phone, and needs to be restarted.

even played Pokemon Go on full brightness in the sun at 85° outside and I open the Best Buy app at home where it’s cool and my screen went dim and phone got hot.

We are not in a position to say what the app is doing, and we are not going to invent a cause. What can be said carefully is this: a shopping app that consistently warms a modern phone during ordinary browsing is spending real CPU, network and rendering effort, and the user is not seeing the benefit of it in speed. Whatever the load is, it is not turning into a faster page.

Losing Your Place: the Tax on Top of the Tax

Slow is survivable if you only pay once. Several reviews describe the version where you pay repeatedly, because the app discards your position and makes you buy it back.

The app reloads after switching away from it to another app for more than a few minutes. If you were looking at a product or were browsing for something to buy, you will lose your place and have to start over.

you will be forced to restart whatever task you were just trying to do because the app has to reload.

I was like 200 items down, answer a phone call, ended the call, and the entire app refreshes.

That last one is the same reviewer who wrote about the heat, describing a phone call interrupting a session 200 items deep. The pattern shows up in filters too:

filtering is incredibly slow and if you leave the filtered list AT ALL, it completely resets.

When I reopen it, none of my filters have been saved, so I have to repeat the entire process from scratch.

I constantly have to re-select the option to view items that are at “my store.” By default it constantly reverts to “my store and nearby stores” literally every single time.

Read those together and the cost of the slowness multiplies. Ten seconds per filter tap is annoying. Ten seconds per filter tap, repeated from the beginning because you answered a phone call, is how people end up back on a laptop.

What Reviewers Think Is Wrong

Eleven reviews in the set volunteer a technical diagnosis. We are quoting them because they are consistent with each other, not because we can confirm any of it from the outside.

Id recommend either removing the web wrapping and building a native app, or reconfigure your web pages behind the scenes to have better compatibility with the wrapper.

I would expect there to be some optimizations for mobile but it doesn’t seem any more lightweight than the web browser.

this app loads Best buys entire database for everything you tap on. terrible architecture or devs that don't know how to program asynchronously or implement caching mechanisms.

it still feels like a UI design from 2015 and a UX that is essentially a web app with more steps.

The common thread is a suspicion that the app is a thin shell over web pages rather than a native client, and that it re-fetches content it should be keeping. We cannot verify that from review text and we are not claiming it. What we can say is that the reported behaviour is consistent with content being re-fetched rather than cached: pages reloading on return, filters not surviving a restart, and the same screen costing the same wait every time you reach it.

The Toggle That Turns Itself Back On

The second-largest complaint that is genuinely about the app, 26 reviews, 8.5%, is about notifications, in-app ads and permissions. Within it, one specific claim comes up 9 times, from separate reviewers, in near-identical language.

Turning off the option in notifications does not work, it will always turn back on. This is not a bug, it is guerrilla marketing.

There is an option to disable promotional notifications in the app, but it just turns itself back on immediately. There’s no way to get order push notifications without also getting frequent spam notifications.

Despite explicitly opting out of promotional notifications in the app settings, it reverses itself in less than a day’s time.

I only want notifications on my In-Stock Alerts but I’m forced to turn on Special Offers and & Promos to receive those.

Two of those reviewers describe it as a legal violation, naming CCPA and CAN-SPAM. That is their characterisation, not our finding. We have not tested the toggle, and a marketing preference reverting is equally consistent with a sync bug between the app and an account-level preference store. What is fair to report is the pattern: multiple people, on multiple builds, say they turned the same switch off and found it on again, and several of them say the only fix that worked was disabling notifications for the app at the operating-system level.

On Android the complaint arrives from the other direction, at first launch:

about 30 secs in, the app FORCES you to enable notifications. i close the app and go back in, again after 30 secs I'm REQUIRED to enable the notifications. even when you hit the back arrow it doesn't let you out.

And one reviewer points out that the app's stated purpose, for them, was to manage those preferences in the first place:

Promotional emails from Best Buy don’t contain an unsubscribe link for deals they are pushing. Instead if you log into your account you are pushed to install this app to control communication preferences for promotions. However the app settings don’t allow you to disable promotional emails.

Sponsored Results and Third-Party Sellers

Only six reviews are filed as pure search complaints, but they say something specific enough to be worth pulling out. Best Buy's app now surfaces marketplace listings alongside its own inventory, and shoppers want a way to separate them:

it seems like every third item is a sponsored result that does not meet the parameters of my search, so I have to wade through a bunch of irrelevant junk.

I come to the Best Buy app to buy from Best Buy. So why I’m shown affiliated sellers using Best Buy as a platform to overcharge for product, I do not know.

I also hate that Best Buy has third party sellers now. I want to buy from Best Buy. Let me turn off third party sellers in the search results completely.

The pricing claim in the middle quote is one shopper's account of one search and we have not verified it. The structural request underneath all three, a filter for items sold by Best Buy itself, is straightforward and does not appear to exist.

Signing In, and the Loop Between Two Errors

Sixteen reviews are about getting into an account. The most common shape is a double bind where each screen contradicts the other:

when I create an account itll say there's already an account and then when I try logging in it says there's nothing with my email wanting me to create account

I try to log in and it says I don’t have an account so I try to make one with an Gmail I’ve never used and it says an account with that email already exists!

That loop matters more than its cluster size suggests, because there is no self-service exit from it. If account creation says the email is taken and sign-in says the email is unknown, the reviewer has run out of moves inside the app. Two adjacent complaints make it worse: a verification-code step that some reviewers say will not accept a pasted code, and a start screen with no way past it.

Had to place the order 5 times before it went through. Had to wait almost 10mijs for verification codes, the system did not allow to cut and paste the code

Your only option when the app starts is to sign in or create a free account. No other options. No shopping, no info, nothing.

One accessibility report belongs here too, because it locks people out at the same door:

Please actually test with Display Zoom enabled on iPhone. You can’t even get past the initial login screen because the buttons are cut off.

Paying the Best Buy Card Inside a Shopping App

Nine reviews are about the store credit card. They are worth separating from the rest because the friction is structural rather than buggy: the card is issued by a bank, the app is a shopping app, and the handoff between them is where people get stuck.

they make it impossible to find the log in screen for citi bank. i regularly spend ten minutes trying to find it just to pay my bill.

The app does a good job of allowing you to shop but is HORRIBLE for paying your bill online. I couldn’t get any of the options to work- text, one time payment or using banking information.

Might have to close my account because only way to access Best Buy Visa card is through this app.

The last quote states the trap plainly. If the app is the route to a financial account, then an app that is slow to load is not just an inconvenient shopping experience, it is a slow route to a bill due date.

What This Set Is Not About

40 of the 305 reviews, 13.1%, are not about the software at all. They are about deliveries that missed their window, restocking fees, Geek Squad coverage, in-store staffing and pricing policy. Those are real complaints about a retailer. They are not evidence about a piece of software, and we did not count them as such.

I bought a Sony camera lens that had a defect brand new out of the box. Well Best Buy still had to charge me a restocking fee which is 15% of the price paid for the item.

the Best Buy membership warranty does NOT extend the warranty but rather runs concurrently with the manufacturer

For context, that 13.1% sits in the middle of the range we keep finding. When we read Costco's app reviews only 2.4% were store complaints rather than app complaints; in Amazon's it was 36.6%. A high share is not a sign the app is fine. It usually means the app is the only place customers can find to shout.

What Actually Helps Right Now

None of this is fixable from the customer side, but a few things reliably reduce the damage.

• Use the mobile website in a browser. It is the single most common workaround in this set, and several reviewers say the web store loads faster than the app on the same connection. If a link keeps bouncing you into the app, open it from a private or desktop-mode tab.
• Do your filtering in one pass. Given how many reviews describe filters resetting after a reload, switch away from the app as little as possible once you have narrowed a search, and note the model numbers you care about somewhere else.
• Turn promotional notifications off in your phone's settings, not in the app. That is what the reviewers who tried both ended up doing. On iOS it is Settings, then Notifications, then Best Buy. On Android it is the app's notification categories in system settings, which the app cannot re-enable on its own.
• Pay the card at the issuer's own site. If the app is your route to a Best Buy card statement, bookmark the bank's login page directly so a slow app never sits between you and a due date.
• When you report it, report specifics. Device, app build, what you tapped, how many seconds you waited. The reviews in this set that are impossible to dismiss are the ones with numbers in them.

The Short Version

Best Buy sells the technology this app runs on, which is why the complaint lands harder here than it would anywhere else, and why so many reviewers reached for the same joke. But the finding underneath the jokes is narrow and checkable: 56.7% of recent negative reviews are about speed, the proportion is identical on both app stores, 39 reviewers pre-emptively ruled out their own hardware, and 14 report the phone getting physically hot. The star ratings, both of them above 4.6, are lifetime averages carrying years of older votes and do not reflect any of it.

You can see the current rating, the recent review flow and the complaint breakdown for both versions here: Best Buy on Google Play and Best Buy on the App Store. If you landed here because you were wondering whether something shadier was going on, our trust check on the app walks through what the rating data supports, and the alternatives page lists apps in the same category with fewer complaints per rating.