Poll Everywhere

Review by eFreeware

Most apps in the audience-response space put the presenter first and treat everyone else as an afterthought. Poll Everywhere for Android flips that: it exists so the people in the room can answer live activities from a phone or tablet, and it keeps a record of what they submitted. The presenter runs the session from a web-based tool that drops activities into slides; this app is what the audience holds.

That makes it a narrow but well-defined tool. If your class, meeting or event uses Poll Everywhere, this is the piece you install. If you have never sat through a session that runs on it, nothing here will mean much to you, and the app does not pretend otherwise.

The developer is Poll Everywhere Services, and the Android app has been on the Play Store since August 2014. It sits at a 3.4 average from 1,383 ratings, with more than a million installs, which suggests a large number of people encounter it because a course or employer requires it rather than because they went looking for it.

Answering a live activity from your phone

The core job is simple. When a presenter starts an activity, you respond to it from your phone or tablet, and the results update in real time for everyone watching. The audience is not limited to the app: the platform also accepts responses through a private response page or by SMS texting, so the app is one of three ways in rather than the only one.

What the app adds over those alternatives is continuity. Your individual response history is saved inside it, so you can go back and look at what you answered and whether it was correct. That matters most in graded settings, where the question is not just whether you participated but whether you got it right.

The most recent update is worth noting for anyone who has used the app before. Presentations hosted on the new Poll Everywhere platform are now supported, and if the presenter is on that platform, the activity loads on its own. That removes a step that used to sit between joining and answering.

Signing in, attendance and recurring sessions

Signing in, or creating an account, is what turns the app from an anonymous clicker into a record. Once you are registered with a speaker, the app can track your attendance and your graded response scores. Without that step you can still take part, but the tracking features are tied to having an account.

The app also handles recurring presenter sessions, so a weekly lecture or a standing team meeting does not require you to hunt for the right session each time. If you attend the same presenter's activities repeatedly, this is the feature that saves the most friction.

Between the response history, the correctness checks and the session access, the app is built around the assumption that you will come back to the same presenters again and again. It is a companion for a semester or a project, not a one-off event tool.

What it asks of you

Poll Everywhere for Android is free to download, carries no ads and offers no in-app purchases. Nothing in the app is gated behind a payment, which is unusual for a tool with this much institutional backing and worth stating plainly.

What it does require is context. The app is the audience half of a system: the presenter needs a Poll Everywhere account and a presentation with activities embedded in it before there is anything for you to answer. Installing it on its own gives you a sign-in screen and not much else to do.

If you want attendance or grades recorded against your name, you have to sign in and register with the speaker rather than responding anonymously.

Getting the most out of it in class or at an event

The practical move is to set up your account before the session rather than during it. Signing in and registering with the speaker while everyone else is already answering is the kind of delay that makes an audience-response tool feel worse than it is.

After a graded session, the response history is the part worth revisiting. Because the app shows correctness over time, it doubles as a light record of how you did across a term, which is more useful than a single score at the end of a lecture.

If you attend the same presenter regularly, use the recurring session access instead of joining fresh each time.

How it compares with a plain clicker

Dedicated hardware clickers do one thing and do it without a login. This app trades that simplicity for a record: attendance, graded scores and a response history that follows you between sessions. For a one-off conference poll, that trade is not obviously worth it; for a course with assessment attached, it clearly is.

The developer pitches the platform as a way to add live interaction to slide decks so presenters can deliver engaging presentations, and says it is used by more than 300,000 educators and over 75% of the Fortune 500. Those figures are the developer's, and they describe the platform rather than this app, but they explain why the app is worth having on your phone: the odds are decent that you will run into a session that needs it.

Nothing in the app's design suggests it is trying to win a popularity contest.

A companion app for people already in a Poll Everywhere session

Poll Everywhere for Android does its job without charging for it, and the features that matter, attendance tracking, graded scores and a saved response history, are all tied to signing in. The recent update that auto-opens activities for presenters on the new platform is a genuine improvement for anyone who has fumbled that step before.

I would install it if a course, employer or event I was part of runs on Poll Everywhere, and set up the account ahead of the first session. It is free, it is ad-free, and it is the intended way to take part from a phone or tablet.

If you are simply curious about audience-response tools, or you want something to run polls of your own, this is the wrong half of the system: the presenter side lives on the web, and this app is for the people answering.

What's new in version main | production | c87639a

• You can now join presentations hosted on the new Poll Everywhere. When a presenter is using the new platform, the app opens their activity for you automatically. • Sign-in fixes and other small improvements.