Some observations from using the system for last Sunday through yesterday.
1. I have T-mobile. My phone is an I-phone 10 and my wife has an I-phone SE.
2. T-Mobile has very good coverage almost everywhere in
Disneyland. The coverage is crap in CA.
3. We had 4 people with us but the other couple we were with did not have smart phone so we linked their passes on our phones.
4. We did use Maxpass on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, but not Wednesday.
5. We managed to get passes of varying numbers all 4 days we tried.
5. We used a very accurate watch. If you hit the app early, it takes extra time to get a BG, and if the park is very full this may be an issue. If the park is very full and your watch/timekeeping device is not accurate you are unlikely to get a BG.
6. Sunday was a very busy day, and we got a late (but not backup) boarding group.
7. Monday was a busy day, and we got an early boarding group. We were worried because we booked a tour. interestingly, booking a tour cannot get you a BG, but if you get an early BG, they do have the power to change the ticket so you are able to board later. They changed the BG for us at the end of the tour, but told us they were able to do this before the tour started.
8. Both of our phones were able to get boarding passes. Mine 10 got 3 of the boarding passes and my wife's SE got the other one. I believe this has more to do with the back end system of Disney rather than the phone, though I think if you have a really old phone it might be slower.
9. We didn't bother clearing caches, but I we did restart the app about 1 minute before the official opening.
10. Many people have no clue what's going on when half the people in the park stop moving and stare at their phones 60 seconds before the park opening, and then start cheering about one minute later. If you read this board, you are ahead of all of them. We saw people asking for the standby line for RotR despite signs put out everywhere about one minute after the park opening that said all boarding groups were gone for the day.
11. On Sunday and Monday (the busy days) we were standing near people that appeared to know what they were doing that did not get boarding passes. I did ask what carrier they had and all were ATT. This was a random very small sample so is not statistically useful, but it appears that a ton of people have ATT and other carriers that use ATT towers. I wonder if these may get overwhelmed briefly when BG's go live. I would also speculate with no true data points that this is most likely to happen when the park is very full.
12. It is also possible that we were just very lucky, though we have friends in the park that used the same strategies we did and they received BG's every time they tried, including 8! yesterday.
13. I do not believe that the speculation that Disney is checking to see how many different phones people are using to get BG's is accurate at this time. Both our party and our friend's parties were using multiple phone with the same passes scanned in and different phones were getting boarding groups on different days.
14. A BIG shout out to those maintaining this thread. It has been beyond useful.
15. Yes, it's totally worth the hassle to get a boarding group. No spoilers, but I would term this an experience, not just a ride. We experienced it 5.5 time in 4 days. the 0.5 was a breakdown with a walk off mid ride. The extra ride on one day was pixie dust that probably should not have happened, and I won't explain it so it might happen to someone else.
