It ‘s a good feeling when you find a cool new iPhone app, and it can also be pretty lousy when you find an app you had high hopes for that turns out to be quite crappy. My daughter now has her own iPhone (my old V1 with phone service turned off) and is getting to know the App Store more and more each day.
Unfortunately, on days like today, and with apps like Animals? she ‘s seeing that apps are often not at all what they ‘re cracked up to be.
Animals? “ as you can see in the screencap at the top of the post “ claims to be ‘A Learning Game ‘. It lives up to that claim in this sense “ it teaches a great lesson that for $0.99 in the App Store you sometimes get a whole lot of nothing.
The premise of this app is that it ‘s supposed to be a guessing game, where the user thinks of an animal and answers questions from the app, to see if the app can guess the animal. Not a bad premise “ it sounded fun to my daughter anyway. Like many of you, I enjoyed 20 Questions when I was a kid, and have enjoyed it with my daughter “ and that ‘s the sort of thing we expected from this app.
Here ‘s how the app works in practice though: the app has all of TWO questions to fire at you. I don ‘t know about you, but I ‘ve been in very few games of 20 Questions that ended after two questions. Oh, and the two questions never vary, just to add to the excitement of this ‘game ‘.
And here they are: ‘Does it live in water? ‘ and ‘Is it an elephant? ‘. That ‘s it “ after those two, the app gives up and asks you to type in the name of the animal you were thinking of, as well as to create and type in questions for it, so it can ‘learn ‘ new animals.
That ‘s right, for your $0.99 you get two random questions and then an invitation to ‘teach ‘ the app everything else that might make it capable of ever guessing any animal. In other words, you are invited to provide pretty much all of the app ‘s content “ all the stuff that would have made this a real app, but the devs could not be bothered to do.
This app also claims to be a great game ‘for anyone age 8 and up who loves animals ‘. I ‘m over 8, and love animals, and find this app a complete waste of time. My daughter is under 8 and is a huge lover of animals, and thinks the app is a load of nonsense. The only thing she enjoyed about it was typing nonsense questions into it when prompted, as a refusal to do any of the teaching it was asking for.
Animals? is in the App Store now, priced at $0.99 “ and in my view would be over-priced if it was free.
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TAGS: iphone apps
