Things a great app doesn’t do

I like games and I look at looks of them and play some of them heavily in addition to creating the jigsaw product line at Puzzleboss. But there’s a lot of scammy and scummy tactics used in apps to waste time, siphon money, and share your private information. Here are some of the things a great app doesn’t do:

1. Virtual currency backed by “real currency” in-app purchases, along with forced delays, forced grinding and forced video ad watching if you want to avoid paying with dollars. Nobody designing a good user experience has ever said “THIS is where we should make players wait for 3 hours if they don’t want to pay!”.
2. Terrible permissions. App stores make it pretty hard to identify the danger associated with some permissions, and they don’t make it easy to even see the permissions, but if you exercise some due dilligence you will be amazed at some of the stuff apps can do in secret. Some examples include observing in detail all the software running on your device, start automatically when your device boots, overlay ads on top of any app, in addition to the “known creepy” stuff like upload all your contacts to a server online or constantly monitor your location.
3. Fake reviews. One easy way to spot fake reviews on Play is to compare the number of reviews to the number of downloads, especially ones with short comments or no remark at all. 20 five star ratings and 1–50 downloads? #lol. On Amazon’s app store it is impossible to spot the fakes browsing on their tablets or within their app, but if you use their website to browse the app store you can view reviewers’ profiles and quite easily spot shills, their glowing reviews especially stand out when everyone else is posting 1-star reviews or if they’ve posted dozens of reviews for the same company.