Fun: United’s App Now Shows How Many Passengers Have Boarded A Flight

United Airlines is in a completely different league than the competition when it comes to the quality of its customer-facing technology, and in particular, the app. The airline recently rolled out some positive app changes, and there’s one update I find to be particularly cool.

United Airlines’ new boarding progress app feature

United’s app was already great when it came to showing boarding progress for a particular flight, but that has now been taken to the next level.

The airline has added a “virtual gate” feature for those booked on a flight, which gives customers real-time updates about which groups are boarding, along with a progress bar that shows how many people have boarded.

A Threads user shares a screenshot of this. The app status bar now shows “what’s happening” at the departure gate. You can see which groups are boarding, which group you’re in, when boarding ends, how many people are booked on the flight, and how many of those booked passengers have boarded.

United Airlines’ technology is on a different level

United’s app has gotten so good that the airline is at that point where it’s adding features that are arguably not even really necessary, but instead, they’re just cool and show such a high level of transparency.

It’s funny, because when I saw this feature, I couldn’t help but show it to Ford, and say “isn’t that cool?” He was a little confused… “okay, but what does one even do with that information?” I thought about it, and I struggled to actually come up with reasons that this is super useful. Instead, it’s more that I love this kind of stuff as an aviation geek. I guess there are a few potential uses:

• It’s cool to see how booked a flight is in general, and to get a sense of how close boarding is to being complete, what the odds are of an empty seat next to you, etc.
• I’m not sure there are all that many practical implications in terms of how one acts at the gate; most people want to board as early as possible to store their bags, and if you’re not worried about that, you can simply show up shortly before the time at which boarding ends

I know United is aggressively retrofitting its domestic aircraft with new interiors and larger overhead bins, but I was reminded of the United Boeing 737-900 flight I took early last year, where boarding was pure chaos, and the gate agent announced that the plane only had room for 65 carry-on bags, meaning only one in three passengers (roughly) could have a bag accommodated in the bin.

In a situation like this, I suppose that seeing the progress bar of the number of people who have boarded would almost make me nervous.

Bottom line

United’s mobile app has a new “virtual gate” feature, which shows an unbelievable amount of information about boarding progress. In particular, I think it’s cool that the app displays how many people are booked on a flight, and how many of those passengers have already boarded. I’m not sure it’s necessarily that useful, but it sure is fun!

What do you make of these new United app features?