Betterfest

Betterfest is for going to a festival with your friends. The lineup, the map and your group's chat are on your phone before you arrive, and they keep working when the network does not — which, in a field with forty thousand other people, is most of the weekend. RATE THE LINEUP BEFORE YOU GO Go through the bill and mark what you want to see. Your group's ratings sit beside yours on the schedule, so you can see at a glance where everyone is heading, which sets are worth splitting up for, and which clash nobody has noticed yet. Write notes on an artist while you still remember why you cared. FIND EACH OTHER The festival map works with no signal at all. Drop a pin where you parked, where you're meeting, or which food truck was actually good, and share it with the group — it turns up in the chat as a card that opens the map. CHAT THAT WAITS A message sent with no bars sits in a queue and goes the moment you have one. Every message shows when it was sent, not when it finally arrived, so you can tell the difference between being ignored and being in a dead zone since four o'clock. WHEN THERE IS NO SIGNAL AT ALL At festivals where it is switched on, phones running Betterfest pass messages to each other directly over Bluetooth, hop by hop, so a message can cross the site without a tower involved. It needs other people with the app in range, and the app tells you when it is on. Messages to your group are sealed, so the phones carrying them along cannot read them; the festival-wide room is public either way. DON'T MISS THE SET A reminder ten minutes before a set you marked, on time rather than whenever the phone feels like it. YOUR FESTIVAL PASSPORT Every set you've seen, festival by festival, year after year. HOW IT WORKS Join a festival, then start a group or join one with a six-character code someone reads out. Everything you do is yours until you share it with a group. If your festival isn't listed yet, you can ask for it in the app. Betterfest doesn't sell tickets, doesn't stream music, and isn't an official app of any festival. There are no ads.

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