United App Not Working: 167 of 412 Reviews (2026)

An airline app has one job that cannot be rescheduled. Either the boarding pass is on the phone at the gate, or it is not. That is why the negative reviews for the United app read less like software complaints and more like accounts of a deadline being missed.

United Airlines holds 4.71 stars from 1,026,826 Google Play ratings on more than 10 million installs, and 866,060 of those ratings, 84.3% of them, are five stars. On the App Store it holds 4.78 from 8,273,732 ratings. Those are good numbers. The complaints underneath them are unusually concentrated on a single stretch of the trip.

Quick Answer: Why Is the United App Not Working?

In this corpus the most common single answer is that the app will not open at all, and that got dramatically worse in August 2026. We pulled the 3,000 most recent US Google Play reviews on 31 August 2026, filtered to 412 substantial 1-3 star complaints, and hand-verified 167 about failing to check in or reach a boarding pass: 40.5% of every real complaint in the window, and 68.3% of those are one-star. Of the 167, 48 are about the app crashing or refusing to launch, 37 about the check-in flow stalling, 32 about being blocked until a credit card is stored, 17 about repeated sign-ins, 14 about a boarding pass that vanished, 12 about passport scanning and 7 about a forced update. The crash share of monthly complaints ran between 6.2% and 11.5% for six months, then hit 26.8% in August, and one build, 4.2.91, accounts for most of it.

How We Read These Reviews

We pulled the 3,000 most recent US Google Play reviews for the United Airlines app on 31 August 2026, along with the live store metadata. The developer is United Airlines, the build was 4.2.93, updated 26 August 2026, and the listing declares no in-app purchases and no ads.

Those 3,000 reviews cover 24 February to 30 August 2026, just over six months. Of them, 1,301 were 1-3 stars. We kept the ones long enough to describe something, 120 characters or more, which left 412 substantial negative reviews.

From that pool we pulled every review mentioning a crash, a freeze, an error, an update, a login, a check-in or a boarding pass. That produced 214 candidates. Reading them one at a time, 47 were about something else: bag fees, seat pricing, delays, cancellations, refund disputes, notification spam. That is a 22.0% false-positive rate, and most of it comes from one word: reviewers say "check in" while describing what a bag cost at the counter. What is left is 167 confirmed reviews, each assigned to exactly one category.

We drew a line at the airline. A review about a flight that was cancelled is not in this set. A review about the app being unable to rebook that cancelled flight is.

The Seven Shapes of a United App Failure

Group those and the shape is clear. Eighty-five reviews, 50.9%, never reach the check-in screen in working order: the app is broken, or the flow is. Another 32 reach it and are stopped by a policy rather than a bug. Only 14 describe the pass itself going missing after a successful check-in, which is the rarest failure here and by some distance the worst timed.

1. The App That Will Not Open (48 Reviews)

Seventeen of the 48 describe the strongest version of this: the app does not start. It opens and closes, or shows a logo, or a black screen. Eleven of the 48 say they tried reinstalling it, and not one of them reports that working. Seven mention a flight they have already booked.

Completely dead. forced to update and now if just force stops at launch. reinstalling does not help. totally dead and I have a flight in two days.

The app used to work great, up until a few days ago with the recent update. Now, it won't open whatsoever and crashes within about a half second. Not super convenient, given I have a flight on United 6 days from now 🥲

it doesn't even open update august 24: no matter how many updates i've done with this app with this phone the app never even makes it past loading the logo before crashing on my phone. I have no idea why it isn't even functional.

I would love to be able to try this app since I'm flying on United tomorrow. I was using it and working on logging in because I had a very old account and had to go through all of the steps to change my password. then just as I got that done, it crashed. now it won't open. I've reinstalled it, turned my phone off and turned it back on, close all my other apps, and it simply won't open.

One Build Stands Apart

Here is the part of the corpus that is worth more than any single review. These are the build labels attached to at least 15 substantial negative reviews, and the share of each one's complaints that are about crashing. Builds with fewer reviews are left out on purpose: a version that was superseded quickly collects few reviews, and the few it collects are skewed toward whoever hit the bug immediately.

Twelve builds sit between 0.0% and 14.3%. The thirteenth is at 31.6%, on a comparable sample, and the reviews carrying that label run from 7 August to 28 August 2026. That is not a run of bad luck.

The same jump shows in the calendar. These are shares of each month's substantial negative reviews:

February is a partial month: the corpus begins on the 24th, so that row rests on 13 reviews and should be read as noise. The other six are full months, and the August figure is more than double the highest of them.

Older Phones, Specifically

Thirteen of the 48 crash reviews name a device or an Android version. Seven of those name Android 10 or an older Galaxy: the S9, the Note 9, the S10. They are describing the same thing in the same weeks, and several say the app worked until a specific August update.

Good when it worked. Aug 18th update crashes on launch, Aug 26th update didn't fix it. I fly next week. OS is Android 10, fully updated, on Verizon Samsung Galaxy 9+

Updated to latest version and now it will not launch. it just crashes 😭😞😭. installed again on 21 Aug and app still crashes. My Samsung S9 with Android 10 was working fine until the 2 Aug update.

The United Airlines app crashes on Launch on Android 10!!! Please fix this ASAP because I have a trip to take in 2 weeks and I cannot Launch the app on my Galaxy Note 9. Please fix this issue as high priority.

After recent update, app doesn't open. Keeps crashing for Samsung S10. Bug needs to be fixed and support slightly older phones.

Have an older version of Android, have never had a problem with the app running. last update causes the app to crash. can't even use it after removing and adding it back.

One of the seven is not at home reading a review. They are already at the airport.

galaxy s9 note now not working! I'm at the airport and now cannot access my app! thanks for nothing united!! this sucks! delayed flight and now phone does not work with your app update!

We should be careful with this. Seven reviews is a pattern worth naming, not a diagnosis, and the app crashes on new hardware too: one of the most detailed reports in the whole set is from a Pixel 10 Pro.

4/2026: Updating my review from 5 years ago... I use this app almost daily for my work. I'm a GS for 4 years, 1k many before that. The app needs to work. Within the last couple of months, the app does nothing but crash or timeout. Pixel 10 Pro running latest released Android. I've cleared cache/storage and re-auth'd numerous times.

Two later builds, 4.2.92 and 4.2.93, carry 10 and 11 substantial negatives in this window, with 2 and 3 crash reports. Those samples are too small to rank, and both builds are days old at the corpus cut-off. What can be said is that the crash reports did not stop when 4.2.91 was replaced.

2. The Credit Card You Have to Store (32 Reviews)

The second-largest cause is not a defect at all. It is a rule, and it produces the angriest reviews in the corpus. Thirty-two reviewers report that they could not finish check-in until they saved a credit card, including when they had no bag to check and had already paid in full.

requiring basic economy fliers to put a card on file to CHECK IN should be against the law. you should be ashamed of yourselves

The only airline and app I've ever used that forces you to put in your card info specifically to check in despite me already having bought and paid for the ticket and bags prior.

Tried checking in on the and got blocked unless I add a credit card "just in case." Not checking a bag, not buying anything at all just trying to check in! Who designed this? Forcing payment info for no reason isn't "convenience," it's lazy, greedy UX.

I really don't like having my boarding passes held hostage. I wanted to check my bags at the airport, but United wasn't going to let me finish the check-in process until I checked my bags. Then they forced me to save a credit card when I didn't want to.

One reviewer says the card was charged anyway.

United requires a credit card to be on file just to check-in. They promise not to charge it unless a personal needs to be checked, then they will charge it. Well they lied. Charged the card without any bags checking in, and no notification.

We cannot verify an individual billing claim from a review and we are not going to pretend we can. What the corpus supports is that the requirement itself is real, consistent across six months and 32 reviewers, and that it lands at the exact moment somebody is trying to finish and walk away.

The version of this complaint that is unambiguously a technical limit rather than a policy comes from reviewers whose cards are not American.

The app does not support credit cards with booking addresses outside the US and Canada. This is especially galling when you realise you cannot check in without a credit card. Additionally you don't see this limitation until after you've gone through nearly the entire check in procedure.

3. The Flow That Dead-Ends (37 Reviews)

Thirty-seven reviews describe reaching check-in and not getting through it. The recurring detail is a screen with no error and no exit: a continue button that does nothing, a confirmation page that will not accept either answer, a loop back to the start.

To check into a flight to another country I am asked to confirm I have a flight leaving. I hit the option to confirm, but the continue button does nothing. Since there is no error message for a backend service being down I assume it's the application.

Terrible optimization, tons of bugs. The American Airlines app is far better in my experience. I tried checking in for an international group flight, and it gets stuck on the "confirm you have a return ticket" page, neither option lets me continue and finish checking in.

I've tried checking in for 2 different fights now & it directs me to a page to select a different flight rather than to check in for my booked flight.

Took me almost 2 hours to check in. Forms not loading, unable to complete because of said forms...too complicated and not user friendly

I can't create an account (gets to "Please Wait" & sits till it times out), I wasn't able to check-in for my flight (same "Please Wait" problem), wasn't able to add a trip ("We're sorry, something went wrong. Please try again.") This app is completely worthless.

A subgroup of these is about time rather than errors. Reviewers count the minutes.

Old and glitchy. Doesn't show my baggage allowance on the baggage allowance page. Seems like a pretty core feature. Not sure why you're asking for a review when I spent the last 20 minutes failing to check in.

4. Signing In, Again (17 Reviews)

Seventeen reviewers describe an authentication loop rather than a single failure: a session that expires between screens, a password reset that resets nothing, credentials that work on the website and not in the app.

The same username and password works on web but when I put the exact same username password in app it says I need to reset my account. I reset it, it works on browser but keep saying same damn thing on app. ended up resetting 4-5 times.

constantly signs you out and it does not recognize your password after you have to find your mileage number because it doesnt remember it you have to reset your password.. then when you try to it just signs you in instead of setting a new password so you have to do it again next week when your booking your next flight.

this app is completely worthless. I sign in and then anything and everything I try to do tells me that my session is expired. I can't even access support.

they make it too difficult to do password reset. The app doesn't remember any of previously input data such as your email address or your United number. I spend an average of 7 to 10 minutes trying in to do a password reset every time I use the app.

5. The Boarding Pass That Disappears (14 Reviews)

The smallest cluster and the one with the highest stakes. These reviewers checked in successfully. The pass is what went missing, and several were mid-journey when it did.

We checked in for our flights from Newark to Budapest, and the app showed our boarding passes - until we got to Frankfurt, then all boarding passes disappeared from the app! Get your boarding pass printed if you don't want wait in line for hours when making your connection!

THIS APP DELETES BOARDING PASSES THIS APP DELETES BOARDING PASSES I got stuck between customs and security in St Thomas with no boarding pass after this happened.

App lost the connection's boarding pass after check in. It was a short connection due to late arrival so the app help of "go to a transfer desk" wouldn't work and the AI chat would not transfer me to a person until after boarding had already closed.

app sucks. doesn't send me my email for boarding passes after I checked in and also doesn't show me my boarding passes on the app after I've checked in

Two more are not about a pass vanishing but about how long it takes to reach one.

make it easier to find my boarding pass. I literally only need this app for one thing and it's buried deep in a sub menu that's hard to find at 5am in some far-flung airport gate. why?

6. The Passport Scan (12 Reviews)

Twelve US reviewers report the document step failing: names that do not match, a scanner that reads a middle name wrong, saved passports the app asks for again.

checking-in through the app is painful, it cannot recognize between first, middle and last name. Upon uploading my wife's passport, it keeps telling the names don't match.

Bad experience with passport scanning. Scanner did pick up everything except middle name and generated error message. Gave up after 4th trial. Japanese app at the same time worked flawlessly.

Passport scanning does not work properly. I've attempted with Apple and Android devices, multiple lightning conditions, and by starring from different menu areas.

1 star to fix an issue! i usually love this app (especially the map to the next gate), but during my last trip, it erased one of my children's passport information so it didn't issue a boarding pass for a return flight. Then it crashed on me at least three times that day.

Twelve out of 167 is 7.2%, which makes this the second-smallest group in the US corpus. Hold that number, because it does not survive the trip abroad.

Outside the US, the Blocker Is a Different One

We scanned 24 Google Play storefronts. The four other English stores, Britain, Australia, Canada and India, returned exactly the same reviews as the US, so they add nothing. The remaining 20 produced 1,596 reviews we had not already seen and 199 substantial negatives.

Fifty-two of those 199, 26.1%, are about the passport or ID step. In the US corpus the same complaint is 7.2% of the confirmed theme. It is the single largest international cluster by a wide margin: 15 from the French store, 13 from German, 7 Italian, 5 Dutch, 4 Brazilian Portuguese, 3 Polish, 2 Korean, 2 Hebrew, 1 Japanese. Fifty of the 52 describe the step failing outright or blocking check-in. The other two are milder: one complains only that a saved passport has to be rescanned every time, and one that the scan is slow and imprecise rather than broken.

German

Leider lässt sich die App nicht nutzen. Bei der Registrierung stürzt die App bei der Eingabe (Dropdown-Menü) des Geburtsmonats sofort ab. Nach vielen erfolglosen Versuchen werde ich die App wieder löschen. Das Problem scheint nicht neu zu sein. Manche Monate lassen sich allerdings auswählen?

This app is useless. At least for the checkin of a non-us passenger. The passport scan doesn't work. Also the error message doesn't say why. Totally frustrating!

The app is quite useless. I have never managed to check in using it. After scanning the passport, an error always appears: either the name doesn’t match the one on the ticket, or the passport number is scanned incorrectly (e.g., the number "0" is always recognized as the letter "O").

Portuguese

Não consigo escanear o passaporte. O app interrompe o funcionamento e recebo mensagem de bug. Vai me obrigar a fazer check-in presencial. Sinceramente, esperava coisa melhor.

Portuguese

Péssimo! É obrigatório escanear o passaporte, porém o aplicativo fecha toda vez que se tenta fazer isso! Impossível de usar!!

Korean

S24 울트라 유저입니다 처음 여권 사진 등록하려고 시도하면 리트라이 두 번 나오고 찍는 방식 변경돼서 멈춰있으라는 안내 나온 뒤에 업로드까지 진행되면 어플이 꺼져버립니다 체크인이 불가능하네요 지인은 아이폰 유저인데 등록이 됐어요

Dutch

Nieuwe Samsung j5 met Android 7 maar het scannen van mijn eveneens nieuwe paspoort lukt met geen mogelijkheid. Alsnog op Schiphol moeten inchecken. In de afgelopen 4 jaar heb dat met geen enkele andere airline zo'n beroerde ervaring gehad. Vlucht zelf was overigens uitstekend

F for Failure! Even in the newest version the app remains utterly incapable of scanning (or entering) Permanent Residency information = no check-in from the app, only at the airport.

An important caveat on these: the international windows are not the US window. Those 1,596 reviews stretch from 2014 to 2026, and the passport cluster is concentrated in 2023, 2024 and 2025, with 12 of the 52 from January 2025 onward. These stores are shallow and slow, so this is a longer, thinner record rather than a snapshot. It says the problem is old and international. It does not say how bad it is this month.

The second international pattern is the American credit card again, this time as a hard limit rather than an annoyance. Eleven international reviewers report that the app will not take their card, their billing address or their phone number.

Polish

Bardzo zła aplikacja. Podczas rezerwacji podaję polski numer składający się z 9 cyfr. System nie przepuszcza dalej i wymusza dodanie jednej cyfry więcej (jak w USA), a więc podanie błędnego numeru telefonu. Innymi słowy, aby dokonać rezerwacji musisz mieć amerykański numer albo skłamać co do numeru. Funkcja chat również nie działa poprawnie. Aplikacja ma masę błędów i jest niewygodna w użyciu. Nie polecam

Two international reviewers report the same escape hatch, and it is not the website. It is somebody else's phone.

Uploading documents for check in doesn't work on this android app version - I tried 3 different devices. I only managed to check in because someone borrowed me their iPhone.

French

Impossible de scanner nos passeports avec 3 appareils Android différents. J' ai essayé avec le Iphone de mon fils et cela a fonctionné du 1er coup !!

The Bug Six People Found on Five Storefronts

One finding in the international pool deserves its own line, because it is the kind of thing that is invisible from inside a single storefront. Six reviewers, on five different national storefronts, report that the app crashes at the same point during account registration: choosing the month of birth.

French

Impossible de se créer un compte, l’appli crash dès que j’entre mon mois de naissance.. j’ai essayé 72 fois et rien ne fonctionne..

Italian

ho provato inserire i miei dati, ma arrivato al mese di nascita l'applicazione si chiude. Prego l'assistenza di avvisarmi del motivo, grazie

The German store carries this report twice, in German. The French and Italian reviews above are the third and fourth. The Brazilian and Russian stores each carry one more, both written in English. They span December 2024 to June 2025, and none of these people had any way of reading each other. One says they tried 72 times.

Six reviews is a small number in absolute terms. It is a large number for a crash that reproduces on a dropdown menu, in five languages, over seven months.

What to Do Before Your Next United Flight

Nothing below fixes the app. These are the things reviewers in this corpus say they wish they had done first.

Step 1: Get the Boarding Pass Off the App

Fourteen reviewers describe a pass that was there and then was not, and several were between customs and security when they found out. Four of the 167 describe getting ahead of that: three took screenshots, and one tells anyone with a connection to print it. That is a small number, but it is the only advice in this corpus that comes from people who were already in trouble.

Step 2: Check In on the Website, Not the App

Reviewers who got stuck on a dead-end screen repeatedly report the same workaround: the browser completes what the app will not. One finished on a laptop after the app refused; two more, on the German and French stores, only got through by borrowing an iPhone. Note the tradeoff, though: two reviewers checked in on the website and the app then kept insisting they had not.

Step 3: Do Not Update at the Airport

Seven reviews are about a forced update arriving at exactly the wrong time, including in the security line, with no option to defer.

They lock you out every time there's an update even though they don't need to. So, if you're trying to pull up your boarding pass to get on the plane you have to wait a few minutes for the update to finish. Very stupid.

You can check into you flight unless you uodate the app. Once you log in the App affirms you don't have any upcoming travel ... untill you tell it to find a specific booking. All in all its a waste of time.

Update the night before, at home, on wifi, and open the app once afterwards to confirm it still starts.

Step 4: If It Will Not Open, Do Not Bother Reinstalling

Eleven of the 48 crash reviews report reinstalling, and none of them report it working. If the app will not launch on your phone, the faster path is the mobile website plus a printed pass, and, if you have time, a second device.

Step 5: Scan Your Passport Days Early, Not at Check-In

If you are flying internationally, the document step is where the international corpus says the process breaks: 52 reviews across nine countries. Add the passport to your profile well before the 24-hour window, and if the scanner rejects it repeatedly, plan on the airport counter rather than discovering that at midnight.

Read the Full Breakdown

You can read the full negative review breakdown for the United Airlines app on Android and United Airlines on iOS, or go straight to the trust check and apps like it. For the same question at a competitor, see why the Fly Delta app will not log in. For how the major US carriers compare on complaint volume, see Delta, United and Southwest Ranked. For a hotel version of the same "the app fails at the door" problem, see Hilton digital keys that do not work. For the pattern behind complaints like these, see why users uninstall apps.