Living in a “foodie city”, this app is PERFECT! It helps me keep up with places I’ve been and reminds me of places I’ve wanted to try. Going out with friends and don’t know where to go? No problem. You can consult each other’s Beli profiles for suggestions. When my family is visiting, it makes it easy for me to recommend places for them to eat. It’s been fun going out with friends and comparing our ratings of different places. My only complaint is the minimal categories in the rating system. The categories you can assign a place to are restaurants, bars, bakeries, coffee and desserts. It’s really hard to compare ALL restaurants to each other. For example, how do I compare a pizza place to a brunch spot? It would be nice if I could personalize the list of categories to fit my preferences and compare those restaurants to each other. For example, I would want to create a brunch category so I can compare all the brunch spots to each other. Or if I’m on a mission to find my favorite pizza spot in the city, I’d create a pizza category to compare the pizza places I’m trying.

I have no idea how this app have this many positive reviews. It is advertised as an app to give recommendations, display restaurants with great reviews, and see where your friends are eating but it barely does any of that. It hides the features that are the reason you’re downloading the app behind milestones on how much you interact with the app. I can’t even review a restaurant out of 10 until I’ve said “I liked” 10 different restaurants. Why do they insist on holding my hand when it comes to restaurants?? One of the things I was most excited about was seeing a map of my city and being able to click on restaurants that are getting great reviews. As far as I can tell, that is not possible. I’m not sure if it’s because I need more friends so the map can fill itself out with what my friends are up to (which is extremely idiotic because I can jus talk to my friends instead of using an arbitrary app) or if it’s because their map feature is completely broken and can’t load anything. Either way, when I look at the map and press “search area” it’s completely blank. If you want to find a good restaurant just use Google, we don’t need a social media app for every aspect of our lives. I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.

First, let me start off by saying I absolutely love this app— me and my friend have had tons of fun rating our favorite restaurants, and I love how it gives you personalized recs after 20 or so ratings. THAT SAID, there is a feature that would make this app actually killer, which is… Integration with Yelp/Google Reviews. If I already looked up the Yelp review and gave it a rating, it can be a pain to open up Beli and rate the exact same restaurant again. This is especially true if I just downloaded Beli as a new user, and then I have to go “hmmmm what are all of the restaurants I’ve visited in my lifetime?” I think it’s much more convenient to have these automatically suggested / added for you. For example, when you open the app you could see a dialogue like “did you go here?” or a list of suggested restaurants to rate. This would go a long way towards improving usability IMO.