Ancestry iPhone Update: Left-to-Right Pedigree

     Users of smartphones have all had this happen: your phone notifies you that one of your apps has a update available.  You go ahead and run the update, then open the app to find out that the "update" is more like a "downgrade."  It's now less user-friendly, missing a feature you loved or now full of bugs.

     This happened to me some time ago with the Ancestry.com app.  I really liked the app and would use it on my phone while at the Archive to quickly navigate my family tree.  But then they released an update.  For some reason, they seemed to think it was a good idea to eliminate the left-to-right pedigree and provide only a top-to-bottom pedigree.  I can't describe how frustrating I found this, so let me show you.  Ok, and tell you a little.

     Say I'm doing some research on my Great-Great Grandparents, William and Frances Barfield.  Then, I want to navigate to my Great-Grandmother, Ledora Barfield.  This is what I see on my iphone:

     I have to navigate over two screens to get to the descendent I want.  Not fun on a tiny little screen! Mainly this is because all of the relatives of each descendant are shown on the pedigree and there is no way to get rid of them.  Moving around the tree was suddenly much more time consuming.

     Thankfully, Ancestry released a new update on their iPhone app that fixed this problem.  Left-to-right pedigrees are back!  Take a look at this single screenshot and tell me it's not much better for navigation: