Yes, it can be a million times better. Full disclaimer: I am a professional Android developer, so I have relatively high standards for Android apps.
I am disappointed by the championship app every year.
From a design standpoint, the app follows almost none of the Android design guidelines. It is very clearly not designed for Android, and every year that more apps begin following the latest design language makes this app feel more and more out of place.
The navigation is atrocious- there is a set of tabs stacked on top of an "app bar" that has a navigation drawer, above an ad, above an announcements bar above a grid containing links to all of the navigation items, some of which are already available in the tabs up top.
There are a number of design features that would be fixed by literally changing a single value in the code. This value would allow the app to at least default to using the latest styling for things such as progress bars in dialogs.
The core issue is that FIRST chose a pretty terrible one-size-fits-all platform that uses the same re-skinned codebase for every event they partner with.
here's their website and
here is a list of apps that are their victims- notice anything familiar in the other apps?
This also means that sometimes the app has functionality (such as the attendees list) that simply don't do anything. Some wording also just doesn't make sense in the app because it wasn't really designed for our use. It also means that I am incredibly concerned about what the app is doing- what data is it accessing and sending back to this third party?
I can understand saving cost by choosing a partner that plans to reuse code from an existing app, but in this case the core codebase is a far cry from what I would consider acceptable. FIRST is unfortunately rewarding this company for extremely lazy development.
So yes, I agree, FIRST can and should do much better. As a company promoting STEM to high schoolers, they should take pride in their technology offerings.