Cobook App Reviews

Ever since Cobook was released, I’ve been so happily downloading the updates—-Cobook started out as such a handy, quick sustitute to the ever more miserable Contacts (how I miss you, Address Book)—even thinking, Gee, these guys are so on it …. And then what happenend? This release, Dec ’13. just went bananas on my fully updated MBPro and 10.9.1. Never seen anything so not work. The hell with LinkedIn, just return us to that neat little working menubar app. Please.

I just updated to the new version and all my contacts are GONE! Please, please, please backup your contacts if you plan on using this poorly designed software.

A Few of the Issues with 3.0 -Orphans modal windows that you can’t get rid off. -Edit of contacts is really inconsistent, some times you can type in field, some times only paste in data. It may or may not keep what you edit. -Even if you want to integrate with LinkedIn, the in-app purchase fails. Not sure what happened, but all the podcasters who keep spreading the love must not be using this version.

Logged in this morning to find all of my contacts gone and all of my tags deleted. This is complete crap and useless after the udate. I have spent the better part of a year organizing my contacts for work and all of it is gone. I mean every single contact. How did this happen? This automatic update has truly just crippled my life. DO NOT UPDATE! DO NOT BUY! COMPLETE GARBAGE app now.

Mos definately dissapointed at the new version.

Personally, I like the new design. However, the functionality is crap. I can no longer edit contacts; the focus is always on the search bar no matter what I do. That makes Cobook pretty much useless as a contact manager. Nice to use to look people up quickly from the menu bar. But editing, nope. That was not a problem in the prior version. Please fix this. As it is, I ditched the iOS app a year ago because it had too many things that weren’t useful, and from what I’ve read that has only gotten worse. I hope the OS X version at least will not deteriorate further. Thanks.

I’m very disappointed with the new version of Cobook. My main use of Cobook (version 1.3.4) was as a Mac-based client for dialing Google Voice. Worked great, and permitted edits to my contacts in the same app. Version 3.0 seems to completely lack the Google Voice support. I’ve gone back to the old version, and am looking at changing to Dialectic ($25) as a dialing client, more powerful as a dialer but doesn’t allow you to change contacts within the same app. Haven’t scoped it out, but apparently Cobook van dial through Dialectic.

I agree with everything the other reviewers are saying. Out with the new and get back to the old.

In the update from v2 to v3, the visual design suddenly got huge and hard to understand, with a faux iOS 7-style layout that seems to have been made to take up as much screen space as possible. More of an issue, though, is that the auto-sync that was previously the most useful part of the app is now gone. Want to have your Facebook friends contact info automatically updated into your iCloud/Google contact lists? v2 could do that, but v3 cant. At this point, unless you really, absolutely want multi-account support and Foursquare/Instagram/AngelList/Xing contact display, theres no reason to update from v2 to v3.

Can I give it no stars? Wow! The whole reason I started using cobook to begin with, and continued support with the iphone app and it’s pay for add-ons was for the automatic contact syncing between my desktop contacts and google contacts. It took me awhile to realize that they weren’t syncing, not because I was adding new contacts that weren’t showing, but becuase I was making changes that I new I made, phone number or email, address change. I contacted support, they removed automatic syncing from version 3. Really? This is a huge step backward. Guess I will have to start searching for a replacement? Maybe Apple fixed the google syncing with OS X Mavericks. I should try it.

Was great; now useless. Don’t like the look. I don’t mind the Mavericks/IOS7 flat look, as long as it is easily usable, this is not. However, the Google Contacts sync being broken means I don’t have contact management on my Mac. I have to open a Google Contacts window in a browser. I’ve been told by tech support that the new version should fix this, and is waiting for approval from Apple. We’ll see. Oh yeah, none of the other PO’d reviewers are friends of mine as one reviewer accused.

Cobook used to be this cute little app that pulled in Facebook and LinkedIn contacts. Now it’s a bloated pig of a ‘flat design’ nightmare. This thing takes up a quarter of my 30” monitor with its popups and shows so little information. Every contact without a photo has an empty ‘grey head’ picture. The sync doesn’t seem to work. Even their website is empty and useless…click on ‘Help’ and you are directed to a ‘FAQ’ with 10 (ten) answers. That is the total of the help. When you edit a contact there is no ‘Done’ or ’Save’ or ‘OK’ button. You are supposed to know that the pencil icon being a subtle shade of orange means you have to click on it to save. Why couldn’t they have left this app alone, not many apps have me shouting at my computer but Cobook achieved this today. Sorry, Cobook, I used to recommend you to people but now I warn them away.

Google Sync is now all screwed up. It keeps adding NEW Groups of contacts in my Google Contacts! I don’t know why…it never did this before. I have to keep restoring an older version of my Google Contacts to get rid of all the extra groups! :( Used to be a cool app but is now very unreliable. Uninstalled and just going to use Alfred from now on.

This idea has potential. Too bad the app doesnt work My Mac OS version can’t access icloud/contacts. I tried the app on my iOS too, but it doesn’t pull icloud/contacts and it can’t connect successfully with Facebook either. Too bad.

Before the last update, I would point the profile on facebook of some contact and the app would take all the information and merge it beautifully. Now it can’t even update the picture, it’s complety broken and useless! Bring back the old one, it ain’t broke it, don’t fix it!

Like so many others have posted recently this app went from elegant to garbage with the latest version update, and now they’ve sold out to a company with a pretty liberal privacy policy, and that company - FullContact - has a “parent company” that’s unnamed that FullContact shares data with. I’m deleting Cobook from my iOS devices and Macs - today!

You’ve been warned. Cobook messes with your default address book, and as far as I can tell, there is no way of resetting it.

I’m very glad Cobook fixed some of the horrible design decisions from before, but when I went to open it up this time I found contacts that had been semi-merged. Both contacts still exist, but now the phone numbers and birthdays are all jumbled together. So two steps forward, one broken leg.

I was an early adopter of Cobook and loved it on my Mac, iPhone and iPad but the Mac version keeps crashing now so it’s a useless piece of software now.

It no longer syncs consistently with the cloud. It doesn’t seem to parse information well like it used to, and it has become a struggle to get data to map to the proper fields automatically. I don’t know what drove the decision to work on ‘copies’ of data, as it seems to have overly complicated syncing.