United's app now shows a personalized flight history, echoing Flighty's features so closely that Flighty itself called it out on social media.
On a related note have you/would you ever post your flighty history? Would be insanely cool to see!
For flight history, you should also look at flightmemory.com. If one has tracked their flights, they are shareable via the app. I've used flightmemory.com for a couple of decades now.
Flighty also integrates with them, so one can export the flightmemory.com trips into Flighty by downloading each page and saving as an HTML file. Cumbersome, but it works. What glitches out, though, is if there's an airport code Flighty doesn't recognize. Whet that happens, Flighty chokes, and it's a PITA to fix it for past flights.
Mine has been flightdiary.net which then got bought by and folded into flightradar24.com
I love Flighty. It's the best app for planning and tracking, hands down.
I love Flighty, both for how useful it is tracking your current and future flights, and for its passport feature for tracking flight history. Worth paying for the subscription (I did a Lifetime sub a while back).
Agree, and I appreciate that often Flighty will pull delay info from the API faster than *cough* AA’s own app.
I hope they keep improving it. It’s still well worth the price of admission.
A lot of work and investment underpins such innovations.
A decade ago, United Airlines operated on a rigid infrastructure anchored by aging, on-premises data centers and legacy mainframe systems. These green-screen programs made pushing updates slow and left the airline struggling to adapt when severe weather or scheduling disruptions hit.
To break free from these constraints, United launched a massive cloud-first migration, shutting down three major on-premises data centers and shifting over 80% of its workload to AWS. United modernized its core mainframes adopting high-speed software delivery tools, slashed software deployment times by 75% and saved an estimated $2 billion. The monolithic codebase was completely rearchitected into global microservices, allowing developers to roll out features twice as fast as their competitors.
This backend overhaul completely transformed the passenger and employee experience. United rebuilt its mobile app around the traveler's journey, introducing features like bag-drop shortcuts, real-time luggage tracking, and virtual "Agent on Demand" customer service. On the tarmac and in the skies, United connected its fleet to AWS IoT Core, streaming 28 GB of data per minute from 20,000 aircraft sensors to predict maintenance issues before they caused delays. Today, that cloud foundation supports generative and agentic AI tools that automatically resolve regional flight incidents in minutes, completing United's decade-long evolution from a legacy carrier into a cloud-native digital leader.
These kinds of things really can't be overstated. Infrastructure updates like that are painful because it takes a tremendous amount of effort and focus from IT teams, with nothing customer facing to show for it while underway. So many executives don't have the patience or conviction to maintain the necessary focus to complete them, and instead prefer drawn out, incremental efforts that don't provide the same benefits and cause more complexity in terms of navigating tech debt. So some kudos are due to the senior execs that allowed United's IT teams to do this, but also kudos to the IT teams for being able to successfully advocate for this strategy.
I really wish more companies were allowed to focus on these types of initiatives, because it allows them to move so much more quickly and with more performant technology.
Unlike the Flighty app, presumably this new United feature works on non-iOS... *cough* (don't worry, friends, I'm cool, I gots an old-ish iPhone... not one of those filthy, uncouth Androids.)
lol ironically this is really the area where United exceeds Flighty in this case. Otherwise quite limited given it only goes back to 2025 and doesn't have all of the data that flighty does (and the visualization is more basic).
Regardless, UA app is actively worked on and UI is miles ahead of say… Alaska….
Alaska's app and website do more things than before, but they feel much more disjointed and harder to use than a year ago, going backward not forward. Example: it is so unintuitive how to do family miles sharing that Ben had to do an article explaining it.
Cool but also not really given it will likely show only united marketed (maybe even only operated) flights? Hardly a complete picture for most of us
Regarding your parenthetical about Delta @Ben, I agree that DL started this crazy "lifestyle brand" concept and with you that it's nute. As a 2MM and Diamond, I don't see DL (or any other airlline) as a lifestyle brand. The only way they impact my lifestyle is by getting me from point a to point b, sometimes smoothly and other times with some level of chaos.
Can you even explain what they are smoking?
I really enjoy Flighty, especially for the maps and graphics. I've considered a lifetime subscription, but it's a bit pricey. Anyone know if they tend to run sales for Black Friday or any other times of year?
Don't believe they've ever run promos for Lifetime. I will say, it has continually increased in price ($199 -> $249 which is what I bought it at -> $299). If you expect to use it for more than 5 years and are comfortable with the risk that it gets completely replicated by an airline (like United) and loses some value for you, then I would just bite the bullet and purchase.
For me, I was already worried about United or Apple replicating features back when I purchased it in 2022, but the former was not a concern because I wanted both long historical data and also non-UA data. I also find it very useful for non-US airlines because their apps are typically horrible. And ultimately I don't think Apple will copy all features because many of them are very AV-geek focused (like telling me if I've flown on a specific plane before and how many times, or the detailed data around airport operations), so they wouldn't invest to that level.
Thanks! I appreciate your thoughts on the value of Lifetime, and I might just go ahead and get it.
Ironically United keeps data going back to 2015 that you can request they send to you (requires some prodding as they sometimes say they don't have it or can't send it and direct you to the website which has a row limit on updates). That means you can get a much longer history in flighty than United's app has (details on one option below).
You can then consolidate the United data (they send a csv per year), upload that to flightradar24.com, which then enriches the data.
Then request to do a bulk import to Flighty using the flightradar24.com format and export your flightradar24.com data. Send that to flighty and voila - you have all of your United activity going back to 2015 uploaded to Flighty.
Agreed, it only sees United's own bookings, so anyone who flies a mix of airlines still needs a separate log. myFlightradar24 is free and takes CSV imports, and Flighty is excellent on iPhone if you're happy to pay. Disclosure: I make TripStow, a web app that installs on iPhone and Android and keeps a lifetime log across every airline: miles, hours, airports, aircraft types and the tail number of each plane. It imports from myFlightradar24, OpenFlights, LogMyFlight or a CSV, so jetset's United CSV route would work there too. Comparison with Flighty, with sources: tripstow.com/compare/flighty