HappyCow - Vegan Food Near You

If you’re writing a review and accidentally swipe down from the center of the screen, it deletes your review and there’s no place to retrieve it. So instead of writing a review for their platform, I’m writing this one star review instead. I’m sure they’ll reply to this when the bug is fixed. I’m very annoyed. Secondly, the “iPad version” (if you can call it that with a straight face) doesn’t support landscape AND they block this app from running on macOS. The app developers give vegans a bad name by being not only controlling, but highly incompetent.

First there is the issue of not having a lot of useful information in areas that are not that popular, though I do understand that it’s community driven so I can’t complain too much about it. But this app is really not great to use. I zoom in to an area of interest and hit “search here” and it zooms way out to an area that is 100 times larger. Every time when you tap on a place it centers the map there. That is not great, I am typically interested in a particular area and I only want to explore the places there, with this behavior I have to re-center the map all the time. And browsing through the restaurants by sliding left and right the options at the bottom is just terrible, no idea what order they are in (certainly not distance), swipe right and I am now on the other side of Bangkok. I actually take the time to input a range of these places in Google Maps and then it’s usable. In this era of AI coding it should be trivial to make this a more usable experience.

Cannot register using the Apple sign in option, get spinning wheel. Was able to register w my email

This is a pitiful selection of restaurants that serve mostly meat but have a $12 boring salad at the bottom of the menu. Worthless to me.

The App Store indicated the app was 4.99, fine, but then I was charged over $38, WTAF. I started using it and one of the first restaurants on the list has been closed for years with another restaurant in its place, so I’m assuming at least in my area this is useless. What a rip off

I've been a HappyCow user for almost 10 years with over 1000 points. Listings are outdated and/or contain incorrect information. A quick Google search is more accurate. Want to add a new listing or correct false information? Cool, your request will sit in a queue and never be approved. The community is TRYING to maintain the website/app and there is 0 response. This is just pathetic. I also tried to leave a review but it said I didn't "own" the app. So I deleted and it said I needed to pay $4.99. Hilarious. And I did, just so I could tell you how bad this has gotten. Try a different app like Spinach or stick to Google.

We try to make updates on a regular basis, but restaurants are not updated with menu, hours, or still vegan options. We’ve suggested a new category: whole food plant based over 2 years ago, nothing.

The filtering is non existent. You can’t filter by vegetarian options available or open now. It’s clunky and I found it unusable during my trip to Japan. Opened it twice and was so frustrated by the experience I didn’t use it again.

I can’t get past the sign up page. It just keeps loading and does nothing. Super happy I paid for this 🫩

This is a good basic resource but it’s not updated and you can find more options just by a simple web search.

^^^^^

I use this app all the time and now it cost $4.99. That crazy

Says it shows for dairy free places and then you pay and it doesn’t offer that option. What a scam. Trash

They have a messaging feature, yet they will restrict access when you use it! Stick with Google maps for vegan food reviews

They don’t let you give one start to vegan and vegetarian businesses. That’s dictatorship. You can’t censor your customers who paid for your app. That’s why as a vegan since I installed this app whatever vegan restaurant I have been it was not good even though the stars looks good. Don’t download this instead search it yourself in google. Doesn’t worth it!

Every time when I zoom-in or out and there is no restaurants around, the app sends me all the way to the closes city w/ restaurants. Then J try to move map to my destination and the app resets the state and sends me back.

I’ve been vegetarian for 30 years and vegan for about 15. During this time, I heard about this app but always managed fine in the various places I lived and traveled (international and domestic). I finally ended up paying for the app about 2 months ago when I found myself in a village in Basque country where there was rarely vegetarian food on menus and a number of restaurants that did have more veg options were closed. No options were listed on HappyCow. Walking around, I eventually found a restaurant that offered a salad that could be made vegetarian or vegan and it was delicious. I took the time to submit this restaurant and meal to HappyCow, as I was very thankful to have found it and wished it had been something I’d found when checking the app. My submission was rejected because the restaurant serves primarily non-vegetarian food, which was disappointing. I continued to try to use the app in France and Spain over the next several weeks. HappyCow never once helped me find a vegetarian or vegan place to eat. There were either 1–2 listings with one or two bad reviews or there were simply no listings. I felt like I was using an app that had been abandoned. It was a ghost town. I’ll keep using Yelp and Google to find vegetarian/vegan food — I’ve had much more luck with these free tools. Edit in response to developer response: I appreciate that this is a small team; however, the app was a disappointment for me, a vegan, and my personal experience is that Yelp and Google are more accurate and up to date.

Poor UX design, especially when moving the map somewhere you’re not currently located

On July 27 HappyCow sent out a newsletter that featured an extremely frail and unhealthy looking woman who clearly had an eating disorder. The photos of this woman were very disturbing. I emailed them to ask for an explanation and apology and no response. I’m not sure what they have to gain by featuring people with eating disorders but I am no longer interesting in using an app from a company who’s values don’t align with mine.

I have an iPad with a magic keyboard attached which means that I use landscape screen orientation. HappyCow does not care. The app forces portrait orientation as if the iPad is just a larger iPhone. It is not. This outdated app pairs nicely with its outdated restaurant data that would take months to bring up to date for just a single neighborhood that I care about. And what’s the point? Yelp exists. Google Maps exists. Apple Maps even exists and is more current. HappyCow is just an old relic from an earlier generation of the Internet. It is no longer relevant or useful, and it shows.

I’ve been wondering why this app shows so few restaurants w vegan options near me, when I know that they exist. Then today I tried to add a review to a great place w vegan options. The app PREVENTED me from giving the restaurant five stars(!), saying that rating is reserved for fully vegan restaurants. This is the kind of judgemental/paternalistic nonsense that gives us vegans a bad name. And it’s counterproductive. I guarantee that Happy Cow’s obscure rating rules have zero effect on the incentives of a non-veg restaurant to become mostly or fully veg. Such restaurants don’t even know that HC exists. But the rules do disincentivize adding options to HC that actual vegans (me) would find helpful. As it is, I find a lot more options by searching in Yelp for the word “vegan” in the reviews.

Very difficult to use. Disappointing.

I went to a restaurant listed on here, I get there after walking for 20 mins, restaurant is no longer at that location. Today, I went to another restaurant here listed as “vegan” and to my surprise, there was not a single vegan option after again, driving for 10 mins. I just deleted the app after having it for 2 years, wasting my time and money.

As an exclusive holder of my iTunes account, I was perplexed to notice a charge for an application I unequivocally did not authorize. Upon receiving the invoice, I diligently examined both my iTunes and iPhone subscriptions, only to confirm that the app in question was neither active nor previously subscribed to in my account. This situation raises significant concerns regarding the security of my financial information, as my credit card was charged without my consent. Moreover, the nature of the app is entirely irrelevant to my lifestyle choices, highlighting the randomness and inaccuracy of this charge. Despite my efforts to engage with the company directly to resolve this issue, my attempts were met with silence, leaving me no choice but to seek a refund through Apple. As of now, I am awaiting resolution. This experience underscores the need for stringent measures to protect consumers from unauthorized transactions and highlights the importance of responsive customer service in addressing such grievances.

I paid the app and received an error that would not let me log in. So I emailed customer support and still have not heard back from them. This was over a month ago. I don’t recommend this app.