My experience with Medallion technology on the Royal

[vampiress]

i'm not an expert on medallion, and i had the iphone xs and 11 pro max.  so we were on the most recent ios and made sure all apps were downloaded and current.  even on the latest phones, i found the trivia part of the app was a little sluggish and sometimes needed to be restarted.  so many thigns, not necessarily your phone are likely contributing to the issue.

 

I work on software for my company,  technology is super hard when there are so many variables like type of phone, operations system, currentness of apps, and hardware capabilities. some of this could be poor app resource management and some might be just being beyond the hardware's capabilities.  my guess is it is a bit of both.

[5:00_Somewhere]

I was just on the Sky Princess last week and my experience was similar to the OP's. We did everything we were supposed to pre-cruise, including adding all our information (including passports) to the app.

 

The Medallion itself worked great, made boarding a breeze, as well as opening our cabin door (handy with 2 coffees and muffins in the morning) and purchsing drinks and other items throughout the ship. We noted that it seemed when we were in very busy areas with a lot of people they would usually scan our Medallions (with a hand-held scanner or by having us tap it on a pay-pad), but if there weren't a ton of folks around they would just tap on our photo that popped up on an iPad near the service stations without the need to present the Medallion itself.  I would also note that when I was ordering cocktails, for instance, for both of us, they would only need 1 of our Medallions. I was told they could see that our accounts were linked and that we both had the bev package.

 

As for the App, it was virtually useless. Actually, it seemed to work fine before we boarded and on most of embarkation day. Then I got an update notice before we sailed, and I thought it would probably a good idea to update before I switched to the ship's wifi. That proved to be a big mistake, as virtually all functionality on the app stopped working after that. However, I initially thought it was an issue with my phone's connection to the Medallion. It wasn't until I finally went to the Internet Cafe a couple days later that they told me that app update I downloaded had some "known issues" and "broke" some of the functionality and that another update would be pushed out in the next day or so. Sure enough, that seemed to fix some of the app functionality, but not everything.  In the end, the app proved to be more trouble than it was worth, and I ended up not using it for about 90% of the cruise.

 

Also, we're elite and get 150 free wifi minutes for a 7-day cruise. But, they were offering a 50% off deal for "Unlimited MedallionNet" wifi on embarkation day (plus I believe we got a credit for our 150 free minutes), so we decided to purchase 1 MedallionNet package in order to compare speeds, connectivity, etc., with our standard free minutes. We found that the MedallionNet service may have been a little faster some of the time, but it was not consistent enough to make it worth the cost for my typical needs on a cruise, so I'll probably be sticking with my free minutes going forward.