About Dienstplan Schichtplan
I saw this app sitting high up in the App Store charts and figured, why not? My team at the bookstore needed a better way to handle our weekly shifts, and a free app sounded perfect. I was skeptical from the start—free usually comes with a catch. After using it on my iPhone 15 Pro for two weeks, my initial doubts were confirmed. What promised to be a simple scheduling tool turned into a source of constant minor frustrations. Instead of making my life easier as the person who makes the schedule, it added extra steps and a layer of anxiety about whether my team actually saw their assigned hours.
Features & Highlights
On paper, it has everything you need. You can create shifts, add employees, and set their availability. I tried to mark that Leo, one of our part-timers, is in class until 3 PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The app let me input that, but it didn’t stop me from accidentally scheduling him for a 1 PM shift later on. That’s a critical flaw. The color-coding for different roles (like cashier vs. stockroom) worked okay and was the one visual feature I found somewhat useful. It mentioned calendar syncing, but I never got it to work reliably with my iPhone’s Calendar app. A shift I added for Sunday morning just never appeared outside of the app itself, which defeats the point of having a connected schedule.
User Experience
The layout is cramped and feels outdated. Tapping on a tiny Tuesday square to edit a shift often opened Wednesday’s column or brought up the wrong employee’s profile. Last Thursday was a mess. Clara called in sick at 7 AM, and I needed to quickly rearrange the day. I updated the schedule in the app, sent the notification, and thought I was done. Turns out, the push notification never reached Mike. He walked in at his originally scheduled time, confused, while I had already called someone else in. We were overstaffed for no reason. The app created the very problem it was supposed to prevent. Navigating menus feels slow, and the whole experience is just clunky.
Pricing
It’s free. That’s the biggest and really only selling point. There are no subscriptions or in-app purchases to unlock core features. But the ad-supported model is brutal. A banner ad is always glued to the bottom of the screen. Worse are the full-screen video ads that pop up out of nowhere. I was once inputting availability for three new hires, and an ad for a mobile game blasted its sound right in the middle of it. For a tool that requires focus and precision, these interruptions are more than just annoying—they break your concentration and make a simple task take twice as long.
Updates & Support
I had a specific issue where the app would crash every time I tried to export the schedule as a PDF. After two days of it failing, I used the contact form in the app to ask for help. The auto-reply said I’d hear back soon. “Soon” turned out to be five days later, and the response was a generic copy-paste paragraph about making sure my app was updated. It was. I wrote back clarifying the problem, and that was over a week ago with no further reply. The update history in the App Store shows new versions every month or so, but the changelogs are just “performance improvements” which doesn’t inspire confidence that real bugs are being fixed.
Security & Privacy
This is where I really got uncomfortable. Upon opening the app for the first time, it asked for a lot of permissions. Some made sense, like notifications. Others did not. It wanted full access to my device’s photos and media. Why does a shift planning app need that? I denied it. The privacy policy, which I always skim, was vague. It talked about collecting “usage data” and sharing it with third-party advertising partners. It didn’t clearly state what specific data points they collect from the schedule itself. I’m entering my employees’ names and work hours—that’s sensitive information. The lack of clarity and the overreaching permissions made me delete all the data and stop using the app entirely. I don’t trust where that information is going.
Can I set employee availability to prevent scheduling conflicts?
Yes, you can input availability for each employee, but the app does not enforce it. For example, you might schedule a part-timer for a 1 PM shift even though they set their availability to start at 3 PM, so you'll need to double-check manually.
Does the app sync with my iPhone's Calendar app?
The app mentions calendar syncing, but in practice it's unreliable. A shift added in Dienstplan Schichtplan often fails to appear in the iPhone Calendar app, which means you can't rely on it for a truly connected schedule.
Why didn't my team receive push notifications when I updated the schedule?
Push notifications can fail to deliver, as one user experienced when an employee didn't get a last-minute change. To avoid confusion, it's best to confirm changes with your team through a secondary method like a group chat until the app's notification system improves.
The app's layout feels cramped and I keep tapping the wrong day. Is there a fix?
The small touch targets for days and shifts are a known design issue. You can try zooming in on your device or using the landscape mode to make tapping more accurate, but there's no built-in fix for the cramped interface.
How does Dienstplan Schichtplan compare to a paid scheduling app like When I Work?
Unlike When I Work, which enforces availability rules and has reliable push notifications, Dienstplan Schichtplan lets you schedule employees even when they're unavailable and often fails to send alerts. The paid app also offers better calendar syncing and a cleaner interface, making it a more dependable choice for busy teams.
