MDE: The Crown Jewel of Disney IT

August 9, 2023

I would like to put a disclaimer out there right now. If anyone slips, falls, and breaks a hip in the puddle of sarcasm that the title of this article is dripping, I am not liable. My sign is up.

Okay seriously, My Disney Experience isn’t THAT bad. It has some pretty useful functionality and it provides me with great deal of joy from time to time. Are you ever bored at 1:30 PM on a Tuesday and want to see the current wait time for Slinky Dog Dash? ME TOO! I do this often enough to be slightly embarrassed about it. Do you sometimes check to see what kind of dining availability is open for dinner tonight? Girl…same. Sheesh, you all are as weird as me!

Beyond the “I’m at home and missing WDW” value of My Disney Experience, how does the app perform? In our circles, we often roast Disney IT (and rightfully so) because of constant technology glitches, outages, random Stitches eating our pages, and other missteps. However, when you start to look at theme park mobile apps, Disney is so far out in front of everyone else, it seems petty to dog on it too much. Universal’s mobile app has 10% of MDE’s functionality and runs like it is powered by a dial-up connection much of the time. And as far as I’ve seen, they are the closest competitor.

So let’s take a look at this app and see what’s useful and what is absurd fluff (and there definitely is some absurd fluff in this app!) We’ll start with the positives because I am such a beacon of joy.

1. Mobile Order* – Honestly, mobile order is one of the greatest things that Disney has done in the last 10 years. It has made meal time, especially in the parks, a lot less of a hassle. No more standing in a long line behind sweaty tourists for 45 minutes to get an uninspired salad or a Disney burger. Hooray! * - there is a caveat with the mobile order function, but we’ll get into that in the negatives.

2. PhotoPass Photos – Having a central location for Disney to upload your photos is great. And when working properly, they load them pretty quickly. Plus you get to be a creeper on other people’s trips if they are connected via Friends and Family and they don’t have their list filtered. A dear friend of mine calls those photos “weirdos in my PhotoPass”.

3. Virtual Queues – I could have actually listed this under the positives or the negatives, but I’ll keep my cherub like demeanor and keep it on the positives. Virtual Queues aren’t going anywhere, so it’s nice to have that functionality right there in the app that you’re going to be on all day anyway. They have really streamlined the process of linking your party early and the refresh process works pretty well. It can be stressful, but it also elicits some adrenaline rushes when you nab a good boarding number.

4. Linking and synching – There are several menu items that allow you to link different aspects of your trip to the app. You can link your resort reservation and see you room. You can link friend and family to connect to them for VQs and Lightning Lanes reservations. You can swap Magic Bands and enable Mobile Magic to use your phone, all through the app. The app also links to Play Disney so you can play the queue line games. Nice.

5. Other assorted services – Cast compliments, park hours and maps, links to ShopDisney, and even a chat feature which I have used before and can be much better than trying to hunt down someone in-person or waiting on hold.

Now for the asinine, absurd, and otherwise waste of digital space.

1. Disney PhotoPass Lenses – I know there are probably people out there that love these things, but I feel like they are basically super dumbed down Snapchat filters that look really fake (at least all of them that I’ve seen)

2. The Home Screen – MDE has an incredibly bloated home screen with a ton of click-bait links to “learn more” about things like MagicBand+, the Passholder Buzz, and adverts for the Disney Premier Visa Card. It seriously resembles the msn.com home page, complete with fluff news stories and Buzzfeed quizzes (but honestly, who doesn’t NEED to know what Lord of the Rings character they are??)

3. Mobile Order – Yes, it is a big win. However, the inability to save Disney gift card information into your payment preferences is a big swing and miss. Yes you can use a Disney gift card with mobile order, but you have to enter that obnoxious number every time you use it, whereas it saves your credit card information. Booo.

More positive than negative is my final verdict on My Disney Experience. It doesn’t have a huge learning curve and the layout is fairly user-friendly. And let’s be frank, gone are the days of enjoying the parks without any technology. Yes, I get it. No one wants to have their head in their phone all day, and if you use it wisely, you don’t have to be that guy. This piece is technology really is a necessity, but it’s not nearly as odious as it could be. What a ringing endorsement, huh?