Solar monitoring apps are supposed to make life easier for home energy management. But when the user experience is dominated by constant crashes, confusing interfaces and inaccurate information, some apps only make things harder. Here’s a rundown of the worst reviewed solar monitoring apps available in Australia.
Which Solar Monitoring Apps Are Poorly Rated?
Following on from our story last week on the best solar monitoring apps in Australia, we’re now taking a look at the options with the lowest review scores for phones on Google Play and the Apple App store at the time of writing.
Interestingly, some of the worst-rated apps are associated with highly reputable inverter brands like Fronius – just going to show that good solar manufacturers aren’t necessarily good app developers.
If you want to buy a particular inverter brand but don’t want to use the associated monitoring platform, a third party solution like Catch Control is an option, but this involves an additional expense.
Growatt ShinePhone
Google Play Store: 2.1 out of 5 average rating
Apple App Store: 1.8 out of 5 average rating
What Users Liked: Some customers say it is adequate for basic solar monitoring.
What Users Complained About: Very buggy and annoying to set up, frequent dongle resets, app freezes, slow data updates that can be more than 5 minutes at a time), lacks advanced functions to customise key settings, graph colors are too similar, inaccurate weather forecasts.
For detail on Growatt inverters used with the app, read our review.
Fronius Solar.web
Google Play Store: 2 out of 5 average rating
Apple App Store: 1.9 out of 5 average rating
What Users Liked: Some customers have welcomed the lifting of a paywall for some features and an improved interface.
What Users Complained About: App freezes, inconsistent data display, difficulties with logging in and two-factor authentication, a history of paywalling key features, missing error codes, poor support.
For detail on Fronius inverters used with the app, read our review.
Goodwe SEMS Portal
Google Play Store: 2.5 out of 5 average rating
Apple App Store: 1.8 out of 5 average rating
What Users Liked: Good presentation.
What Users Complained About: App crashes after updates, missing consumption data, connectivity issues with new routers, broken landscape mode, long-standing complaints unaddressed.
For detail on Goodwe inverters used with the app, read our review.
SolisCloud
Google Play Store: 2.5 out of 5 average rating
Apple App Store: 2.4 out of 5 average rating
What Users Liked: Timely device failure notifications, good historical data.
What Users Complained About: Difficult to set up, difficult/impossible to log in, difficult to contact support, complex menus, “real-time” data updates lag by several minutes.
For detail on Solis inverters, read our review.
For solar monitoring apps that offer a more appetising user experience, check out our rundown on the best-rated solar monitoring apps in Australia.
About Max Opray
RSS - Posts
Can only agree re the Growatt app!
And behold, download some data. It comes in an Excel 97 format and the formatting is such that the fields with numeric data in are wrongly formatted and cannot even be added up! I contacted them and they told me that what you see is what you get.
Hi William,
In the industry they’re called Nowatt for a reason, sadly.
It’s a shame as the 3 inverters I have are 3 and 5 years old and working nicely since their respective installations without any issues. Problem points are the dongles and the awful buggy software.
Hi William,
The notion that any of these makers can offer a “10 year warranty” on a product, with only 2 years coverage on the connectivity they need to maintain the warranty on the battery, is just a rort.
The ACCC should step in to sort this.
Maybe you ran out of space but SMA Energy app deserves a rotten tomato for sure. They took what I thought was a reasonably good app, good look and feel, everything made sense and was in the right place to an app that is now almost rubbish. They “upgraded” it, by downgrading or removing features. It took several 1 star reviews from myself and others just to get historical data back into the app but still far from good. I feel my SMA loyalty is being tested again. The other time was the second failure of their “you have to buy our more expensive 3 phase Energy meter cause we dont have a single phase model available or approved”. Side question, has anyone else had these die? They just stop communicating, reset works for a while, then i needed to turn off the main switch, now it’s dead dead for the 2nd time.