Shinkansen smartEX App 4+

This app shows the decline of Japan as a world power. Cheaply made, confusing and hard to use. It forces you to pay the basic fare from a Shinkansen station to another Shinkansen station which is good if you’re not taking the regular train before or after Shinkansen, so you end up paying more.
For example, traveling from Yurakucho station (Tokyo) to Shimoji station (Aichi), total fare buying at the station ¥8,570 (¥5,170 basic + ¥3,400 Shinkansen fare), same price buying from this app, you can only buy the ticket from Shinagawa to Toyohashi (both Shinkansen stations), price the same! ¥8,570, however you also need to pay the fare from Yurakucho to Shinagawa, and from Toyohashi to Shimoji.
This “glitch” can make people miss the Shinkansen and ruin their travel plans (like going to the airport to take a flight, etc.)
When I first downloaded this app I had a suspicion it will have several glitches so left early to the train station and had time to buy the extra tickets needed to be able to use this app, ended up spending more time and money, next time I will just pre-purchase my tickets at station.

This app has so much potential. Ability to book almost any Shinkansen, accepts (at least theoretically) foreign credit cards, integrates with both physical and mobile Suica. All sounds great, except there’s some terrible user interface design decisions and more often than not it simply doesn’t work.

First of all, credit card verification randomly fails. Tried my cards from three countries over four months and only once would it accept it. Other times it issues random “please contact your issuer” errors without even popping the 3D secure window. But it doesn’t end there. Some bright spark decided that if their incredibly error prone credit card verification failed, they’ll kick you out and make you start over again. If you’re in the midst of registering that means 5-8 minutes of wrestling with the app lost.

Second, the session timeout is measured in minutes. This is on a phone where most everyone has biometric authentication enabled so sessions could safely last for months. No, 5 minutes idle and you get to login again.

Third, it constantly sends 2FA codes to email. I counted at least 4 separate codes needed during sign up. Come on. Did no one do any basic flow/usability testing?

This app is unfortunately a testament to how low a priority JR (an Japan in general) puts on software. Get your act together JR and put a competent team on this app and make it great!

Living in Japan, I have used this app for years and it was a godsend. The most recent version has stopped accepting my Japanese bank issued credit card. I have deleted and reloaded. I have gone on to the Japanese website, to my account and reset credit card cashing the system to work once and then go back to failing. What makes this worse is that the upgrade only seemed to add non-train travel functions. So what we gained is less than what I lost. I hope that they can figure this out, as having the app allowed me to travel spontaneously and to be flexible with my schedule. The last update allowed us to buy multiple tickets and assign them to different ic cards. This was huge improvement and welcomed. But that upgrade did not break the app like this last, worthless one did.

Please fix JR