Ancestry app allows me to find out more about my family tree or to find relatives all over the world whom I lost contact with or never met in my life. It’s a genealogic tree on your phone. This is the app version for the Ancestry website.
Interface 8/10
I didn’t give it the highest score because the app does have everything I need but its so expected and not surprising to see the interface with that style, features, and colors. So I have my family tree on the main screen of course. I can change that to family view or pedigree view. I can move my family tree around the screen in any direction I want. And I need to do that especially when or if my tree will get so big - it simply won’t fit the screens’ frame. In general, this app is intuitive to use.
Features 10/10
I can add a story about any family member - date of birth, their place of residence and where they have lived before. I can even build their personal timeline to see where they were at different points of their lives. If I click Family icon under the name I can see this person’s family tree from his or her perspective (his or her father, mother, grandparents, etc.) I can download this relative’s pictures to the gallery if I want to with the corresponding icon. I can share images from my camera directly to the app.
I have hints in the app where I can get additional info on my family members from U.S. Census with their death record and such which I was surprised with. I thought before that it's very secret and serious. Be sure though to check the original take from the Census because the written data from it might be wrong or not about your family member at all. I also can submit my DNA test results, and I’ve already invited my family members to do their DNA tests and put the results into this app so we can see our overlapping ethnicities.
Performance 10/10
All of the Ancestry features work and perform well - I didn't experience any difficulties or troubleshooting while using it.
Pricing
This app isn’t for free - you must to have their website membership. Mine is U.S. Discovery for 19.99$ a month, but I’m thinking to switch to World Explorer to see if I have relatives anywhere else in the world. It also has All Access with all features such as finding info on your family from more than 142 million newspaper articles, from 537 million records from their historical military records website and others.
The Verdict
This app doesn’t work on Android even on Samsung phones - iPhones only which is sad because I'm sure not every member of my family tree has iPhone, so it makes building anyone’s family tree more difficult. But this is still a great app, and I think it’s more relevant than ever because we get lonelier and lonelier because of the social media effects. I personally didn’t find any surprising distant relatives through this app, but I hope one day some younger member of my family who will approach this more seriously and then he or she will find my data, add it to his or her findings and we will both discover new things about our ancestors.