UK ETA 4+

I applied last night I had all sorts of trouble getting the chip to read. I tried for several minutes every which way to no avail. My wife applied several days before me, and she had similar issues. I asked her what her trick was, and she said just skip. She had done that and didn’t have any issues getting approved pretty quickly. So I followed her advice, and just skipped, and went through the rest of the process. Everything went through just fine, and I ended up being approved within a minute. I hadn’t even gotten my credit card back in my wallet before I got the approval email. That part was quick and over all the whole process was simple and straightforward overall. (And I even got approved more quickly than she did). Fix the chip reading part of this app, and it gets at least four stars.

Looking forward to my trip to the UK in the upcoming months!

We’ve done three passports in a row and despite positioning them the same way for each separate process, it took different times to read the chips and these are passports from the same nationality (presumably the chip is located in the same place) and the same phone was used. For first passport took three tries, the second took about 10, the second took maybe 30 tries and needed to shut down the app once in the midst of it to restart the process from the start. Every time too it failed to read the chip the message would be that the phone or passport were moved even though that wasn’t the case for 99% of the attempts.

So this app is in dire need of fixing how it reads the biometric chip as it was a frustrating process. The app should also have a section to enter the authorization’s reference number and maybe some associated info such as the last name or passport number or date of birth to be able to retrieve the ETA and know what the validity is instead of merely needing to go back to my email to find it.

The overall ergonomics of this app are not bad. The textual explanations are also pretty good. The overall ergonomics of this app are not bad. The textual explanations are also pretty good. However, the app has a couple of really major technical bugs.

1. On my brand new iPhone 16 Pro, the app was unable to use the camera, even though I allowed it access. I tried several times to scan the photo page of my passport, but each attempt failed to access the camera device. The message inside the camera framing box was “Camera Unavailable”. For this reason, I had to use my older phone.

2. Then, on my older phone (an iPhone SE from 2020), the passport scan via the camera did indeed work. However, try as I may, I simply could not get the app to find the biometric chip inside the passport. I tried closing the passport and scanning from the outside as indicated in the instructions. When the app failed several times to locate the chip on the outside, I also tried scanning the photo page, as also indicated in the app in case of difficulties. The app simply could not find the chip, and the passport definitely has one. The symbol is there, and the passport is only one year old. I had to resort to confirming the information manually.

Once they get these bugs, ironed out, however, this will be a pretty simple procedure.

Note that the payment process worked perfectly. :-)