From apps that are completely useless to apps designed only to con people out of their hard-earned money, these apps make us wonder if smartphones should be called "dumbphones".
Please do not add smartphone games to this page - those belong in the Smartphone section at Video Games: Other (though if your example is a non-gaming app that disguises itself as a game, feel free to add it here).
Important Note: Merely being offensive in its subject matter is not sufficient. Hard as it is to imagine at times, there is a market for all types of deviancy, no matter how small a niche it is. It has to fail to appeal even to that niche to qualify as this. Examples should also not be added until at least one month after the app's release, to make sure that the hatred isn't just a knee-jerk reaction and to give the developers a chance to fix the app via updates. This includes "sneaking" the entries onto the pages ahead of time by adding them and then just commenting them out.
Examples:
- Call Blaze and the Monster Machines was a bootleg app that claimed to be a tie-in app to Blaze and the Monster Machines, but was actually a reskinned version of a tie-in app to Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween - a movie that definitely shouldn't be shown to Blaze's target demographic of young children (especially if they're not aware the Goosebumps franchise even exists), and is the primary reason it's on here. It's unknown if this was so the app could teach irresponsible parents that they shouldn't leave their kids with a smart device unsupervised, wake Google up to the need for some sort of quality control on the Google Play Store, or simply to scare children shitless; in any case, even if there was no reason beyond "we don't understand what we're bootlegging", it did all three. It pretended to be a phone app where you could call characters from the show, but after going through several buttons, the Goosebumps character Slappy talks about playing with the listener
and then proceeds to threaten the (presumably young) listener with a knife. All while the app kept masquerading as a tie-in to a preschool show. After several horrified parents brought attention to the app, it was quickly removed from the Google Play Store. Here's a transcript of the dialogue:Hi kids! I'm your new friend! Happy, Slappy, whatever you want me to be called. You see, I want to play with you, kiddo. Maybe we could perform some fun games together! What's this hogwash? You look afraid! Is it this knife in my whirly-dirly hands? Making you a little nervous, huh? That's all right, cause this knife is gonna improve your looks... when it's sticking right out of you! [Evil Laugh] - Cry Translator, an iOS app that claims to be able to translate your baby's crying to determine what's wrong with it. It sounds like a nice idea in theory, but as it turns out the app just plain doesn't work and can even be very dangerous. Not only is it more likely to come to erroneous conclusions (saying the baby is hungry when it just needs a diaper change, etc.), but translating the same cry twice can and will lead to completely different answers. The app currently has a 1-star rating on iTunes for its most recent version. Cracked takes a look at it, and other similarly flawed apps, here.
- Fitness Balance is marketed as a calorie tracker exclusively for iOS that works by using the iPhone's Touch ID. However, when the user tries to do this, the app immediately attempts to charge the user up to $152, which is guaranteed to cause said user to lose money if they've already linked their debit or credit card to their Apple ID. Even if the user avoids this trap, the app just gives a "Continue" prompt; clicking on it... brings up the charging prompt again. More details here.
- The short-lived app I Am Rich was Awesome, yet Impractical taken to the extreme. For $1,000 you'd get an app that did nothing but show a glowing red gem with a misspelled mantra appearing when you click it. An app that was good for absolutely nothing, it was downloaded only 8 times before being taken off the market. Not to mention that some people bought the app accidentally and had to get their money refunded. Unlike most examples here, however, it was meant not to scam people out of their money, but to see what the maximum sale price on the App Store was... and invoke Conspicuous Consumption on it.
- iContra. Those who bought this app thinking it was an iOS Contra game were quickly disappointed, as all they could do with it was play a selection of sound effects from Contra. And this was a paid app! Not long after it was published, the app was removed from the App Store for trademark infringement.
- Apple's iOS 6 Maps app. Apple wanted to get a slice of the market previously occupied by Google Maps, so they removed Google Maps from iOS 6 and included their own proprietary map system. The problems were numerous: the 3D modeling was abysmal, with random mountains, canyons, slopes, waves, and curves all over the place and many tall buildings being completely flat. The photography was poor, with many locations being obscured by clouds or just flat-out missing. The absolute deal-breaker, however, was how it frequently gave out wrong directions and put things in wrong locations - among many other goofs, it placed a Chinese takeout restaurant in the middle of a river, instructed drivers to drive into bodies of water and through people's homes to reach their destination, confused a pub with a nursing home, and somehow managed to label North and South America as Australia and Antarctica. It was so bad that the Australian police advised people not to use it note , and Apple CEO Tim Cook later apologized for its poor quality and recommended Google Maps. The only good thing that it caused was this rather amusing tumblr of people's screencaps of the many failures of the app. At best, the iOS 6 maps are So Bad, It's Good.
- The N8 STATE app claims to protect users' DNA from EMF radiation, among other nonsense, for a $3 (USD) price. Somehow, even though anyone with basic knowledge of electromagnetic radiation and programming can tell how illogical and infeasible the app is note , several reviewers (especially those who bought into conspiracy theories about 5G cellular technologies) fell for the app hook, line, and sinker. Despite Google taking down similar conspiracist apps from the store (such as the Infowars app, which was removed due to it spreading false information about the COVID-19 Pandemic, it wasn't until March 2021 when the app was removed due to misleading claims... before being put back up by June of that same year). Like the Virus Shield as mentioned below, the app did absolutely nothing other than displaying an icon and pretending to protect the user from radiation. Additionally, some users who did fall for it expressed concern about its need to access the phone's contacts list, which is generally seen as a red flag for cell phone apps. Despite all of this, it somehow has a 4.2-star rating, which is likely from many downloaders of the app experiencing a form of the placebo effect, as many positive reviews mention merely "feeling different" while the negative reviews (and even some of the not-negative ones) point out that it simply doesn't work. An exposé of the app and its functionality (or lack thereof) can be found in this blog post.
- After the COVID-19 pandemic caused students to be unable to physically take exams at college, Littlemore Innovations developed an app called Pexa Lite, which students would download on their devices to take online exams. While a good idea on the surface, the app was immediately met with claims of it really being a Trojan - and these weren't exactly unfounded, as it would take control of the device, end the exam after any attempts to close the app, and require control of the webcam, which many students saw as a privacy risk. While the above points could be justified as anti-cheating measures, the actual app wasn't that good: it frequently crashed laptops when it was merely downloaded, and the picture quality was so poor that anything written on paper was rendered illegible, nullifying the entire purpose of the app. These issues caused a severe backlash amongst students, and colleges almost immediately dropped Pexa Lite as an option and looked for other ways to conduct exams.
- For approximately one day, an app version of Pokémon Yellow appeared in the App Store and flew to the top of the chart due to its cheap price of $1. Unfortunately, all the app did was show a picture of the game's title screen and crash. Apple quickly deleted the app once they got wind of the scam, refunding everyone's money.
- Proctor U, which is a monitoring software as opposed to an app, caused endless controversy by automatically assuming that students were cheating if they weren't always looking at the camera, and thus gave them a 0 on their exam. The problems with this should become apparent immediately - if a student so much as took a sip of water, turned their head towards a loud noise, or simply got distracted, they would be penalized with a failing grade. Of course, students complained about this, pointing out that not every student has a quiet place to take tests in, not to mention how disheartening it is to penalize minor movements for students with disorders like ADHD, which essentially amounts to penalizing them for having a mental disability. Unsurprisingly, schools who were using this software quickly dropped it and searched for better alternatives.
- Quibi was a smartphone app created by former Disney chairman and DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg meant for the express purpose of being the smartphone's answer to other streaming services by creating 10-minute-long TV-quality episodes for shows exclusive to the platform. While its goal of being "TV in your pocket" sounded okay on the surface, the problem was that their subscription model cost $4.99 per month with ads ($7.99 without ads) for a program designed exclusively for smartphones and tablets. Keep in mind, smartphones and tablets have access to other streaming services with ad-free streaming for much cheaper. As a result, despite investing over $1.75 billion and launching on April 6, 2020 (around the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic that led to a boom in streaming services due to people quarantined in their homes), Quibi had a mere 72,000 people subscribe for their services by July 2020, with only 7,000 sticking around after the 90-day free trial. Combine all that with a lawsuit against it by Eko & Elliott Management before launch and failure to find any investors to help out when it was struggling, and it became very apparent as to why it shut down in October 2020, barely 6 months after launch. The service would become heavily mocked on social media, with many people making videos chronicling its failure, including ColdFusion, The Company Man, A Dose of Buckley, and Ordinary Things.
- It also doesn't help that many people accused Quibi of using the format it did in order to bypass union rules, since 10-minute chunks of content didn't technically count as protected by the relevant screenwriter's unions. As a result, they ended up boycotted by the various Hollywood writer's unions, were unable to hire any good writers, and paid an enormous amount of money in script bounties to incapable writers. That's right - by trying to dodge supposedly-restrictive union rules, they ended up paying more money for worse writing.
- There was an Android app called Virus Shield that promised ad-free protection from viruses, and it only cost $3.99. Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, the app only pretended to be an antivirus, and did absolutely nothing other than displaying a toggleable shield icon and running a fake virus scan. 10,000 people were duped before Google took it down.
