eBay Android App Update: Degraded Image Resolution, Slow Page Loading

eBay's latest mobile app update for Android degrades buyer experience with low resolution images and slow loading times in run up to critical Black Friday/Cyber Week sales.

Users have been reporting the issue in the eBay community and across social media:

All Listings Have Low Resolution

Using the latest Android app, I woke today to find an annoying bug which is causing all pics to appear only in very low resolution. This is effecting every listing, mine as well as any others I looks at. After clicking on a listing the main picture appears for a split second in high res, then a…

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Using the latest Android app, I woke today to find an annoying bug which is causing all pics to appear only in very low resolution.

This is effecting every listing, mine as well as any others I looks at.

After clicking on a listing the main picture appears for a split second in high res, then as the rest of the page loads the image converts to low res, and that's how it remains. If I click to open an image it's low res, if I zoom in it's all pixels.

This wasn't the case yesterday, all pictures were loading fine before today. I've tried wiping cache and data and reinstalling to no avail. I've switched WiFi connections and tried on mobile data, it's all the same low res. My internet connection is great at hundreds of mb/s.

I cannot see any settings that toggle the resolution of images. As a comic book seller it's important I'm able to see high resolution images of potential purchases to check condition. If I go to eBay on a browser all images load in high res just fine, it seems to be an app only problem.

As I conduct my business exclusively via my phone, and I routinely browse through perhaps 2000 listings a day, it's not practical to use the browser website instead of the app, but right now the app isn't functioning either.

Twitter/X:

Reddit:

I noticed this too. But what's really strange is that I was talking to my wife about it, so she pulled up the exact same auction images on her phone and they were crystal clear.

The only difference is that she has an app update waiting to be downloaded on her phone and I did not. So maybe it's got something to do with a recent update?

I put the app update theory to the test, with my Android phone initially still using app version 6.185.1.1 everything was loading normally in the expected amount of time and at the expected resolution.

Then immediately after updating to version 6.186.0.2, everything in the eBay app is very slow to load - everything else is the same as far as the wifi connection, device etc, only the app version changed. 

On item pages, it will load the low resolution version of the main image and/or some of the image thumbnails will initially be missing and will only load after 10+ seconds.

Category pages are much the same - bubbles or boxes that would normally have thumbnail images are initially blank, with the images only loading after several seconds.

And it's not just images, when tapping on a listing from a category page it initially seems like it didn't "register" the tap, taking several seconds for anything on the screen to change/respond and start to load the listing page.

So far it appears to only be an issue with the Android app, I have not seen any reports of similar problems in the iOS version.

eBay community staff have responded to reports of the issue and are forwarding it to the mobile app team.

Affected users can also report the problem directly to eBay's technical department by physically shaking their phone while the eBay app is open. That will open up a screen to submit a tech report and the more people who submit reports, typically the faster eBay will get the issue resolved.

Are you experiencing this problem with the eBay app? Let us know in the comments below!