Ok, so I broke down and downloaded the app to my iPhone sometime during the summer of 2021 because I supervise a lot of people and babysit the rest of the office so I was constantly being hounded by every method possible (texts, calls to my cell and desk, emails, and Teams). Every time I stepped away from my desk for even five minutes there was a crisis I had to handle immediately so I wasn’t able to see or respond to missed Teams messages until I got back to my computer. I would’ve given it a full five stars BUT, several months ago the emojis just vanished from my phone app. I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling and logging out and back in, but alas, there’s just empty black space where the emojis should be. I’ve discovered that if I tap on a random place in the blank space, it DOES throw an emoji up for me but I have no way to know which one I’m accidentally choosing! I’ve seen other people post that they have the same issue but that glitch has been there for months and Microsoft hasn’t fixed it yet. For an industry giant like Microsoft, that’s unacceptable. A lot of people may think it’s no biggie but I use emojis a lot to soften what I’m saying when I have to inform one of my staff that they screwed up. People appreciate that more gentle approach. So yeah. I’m done with my rant now.

At work they have transitioned from an email service to Teams. So I’m using it weather I want to or not. I like teams for collaborative work on documents, we don’t have to each edit our own copies and then try to merge all the copies together somehow, we can all work on the original document together. The chat function is fine except you cannot delete chats, you can only hide and mute them. So every chat group I have ever been in is still there just muted and hidden. There is no way to clear chats or teams. Whatever has been written will stay there forever unless everyone in the chat/team/channel deletes each and every post or comment they made. The same goes for activity. I have thousands of notifications in the activity tab that cannot be deleted. It makes the app feel very cluttered all the time. WhatsApp is way better in my opinion for chatting but of course the company wants better privacy than WhatsApp so now all our communication must go through Teams. Another problem I have encountered is using the calendar in teams, it doesn’t link up with outlook calendars very well, sometimes at all. So when we need to schedule a team call, I have to exit teams, check outlook calendars and then go back to teams. Anyway, there are some good things about teams but it could be so much better if they made some functionality improvements. I don’t have much hope that much will change however, making the user experience better isn’t a cornerstone of Microsoft.

I use Teams almost every day on my work PC. This iOS version is awful! I joined a meeting and found there’s no “focus on speaker” setting, so I was stuck in a gallery and couldn’t see the person talking. I accidentally made the video vanish and couldn’t restore the video view. It became an audio only meeting for me, with no ability to get the video back. Joining the meeting from a web-style link was impossible and errored out three times. Only a direct link from the original invite worked. That required me to find a different email. I was late to the meeting as a result. Even then, it required me to allow Teams to connect to other devices on my network—which I then turned off immediately. There’s no need for it to connect to anything but my router! Since it’s logged in to my work account, many features aren’t available if I have a meeting with people outside my organization. ARE YOU SERIOUS?! What’s the point, then, of using Teams—and all the fees that go with it—if features are blocked? I don’t know if Microsoft is intentionally diminishing the capabilities for iOS or if they’re just not competent at programming for Apple devices, but this was frustrating to use and I don’t recommend it.

Microsoft teams is the worst app to use for meeting, family matters, and especially school. Teams is slow, buggy, and VERY annoying to use. Speaking as a student who uses this app around 7 hours a day, teams is incredibly buggy. The most notable bug has to be the camera. I have been marked absent multiple times just because team was being buggy and wasn’t showing my camera on. It gets very annoying when i have to constantly email my teacher(s) that I wasn’t absent and teams was just showing my camera off. Another huge thing wrong with this app has to be the fact that it’s very slow. In almost all my classes, my teacher(s) have to stop at least once a day just because teams is being slow and they can’t share their screens. Teams also likes to delete work in the class notebook which can be a very bad thing when I turn in my work and i get a 0 because it shows as blank. Finally, this app is just annoying to use. When you use the teams app on your phone, it glitches out so everyone on the computer can see your face super zoomed in. I was actually called out by a teacher for not paying attention when I was trying to move my phone away so it wouldn’t be so zoomed in. Another huge issue is that when you use this app on desktop and in a browser, you can only have 3 teams tabs open (this is a huge problem for me since one of them has to be my meeting) and you can’t do gallery view which is very annoying when it comes to breakout rooms. To sum up what has been stated, teams is slow, buggy, and super annoying to use. 0/5 and I would definitely recommend using google classroom.