App Critics

Developer: Gary Fung
Category: Productivity
Version: 1.0.2
Release Date: August 13, 2009
Size: 0.8 MB
Price: $0.99
Rating: 7/10

The App Store is a mess, that's a fact. There are close to 100,000 apps available at the time that this review was written, and a few weeks ago there were more than 3000 apps submitted to Apple in one week. Apple has it's work cut out to make the process of finding quality apps easier, but since they are the only vendor, they really don't have too much driving them to do that, the app consumer is always going to buy at the App Store because there is no other place to get apps.

There are 62 App Stores out there, designated by country. Any user can open iTunes and select the user account, re-enter the info and set up the account in the App Store from another country. This allows you to view some helpful information like the top apps in that country, the staff picks, what's hot, etc. It's particularly helpful to read the customer app reviews in other countries, but flitting around from country to country is definitely time consuming, and when you finish you need to get back in and re-create your account in the U.S. App Store.

App Critics attempts to make the process of choosing a quality app a little simpler, but it is still bound to Apple's lame format. What it does is search the whole App Store data base of reviews, and presents them to you in a list by country. This is a helpful task, you get to see what other like minded app consumers have to say about the product. You can read every review from every App Store, the app will translate the reviews also, but the translator is inaccurate at best. You can also save the apps that you want to track and follow them as time passes.

As a quality control type service it does a fairly good job, but at the same time it is slave to the App Store where people give notoriously unhelpful, short, biased or slanted reviews. Although it does not claim to, the app also leaves the BIGGEST problem unsolved, which is actually FINDING the apps you want. That is where the problem really lies, and what web-sites like AppsAddicts.com try to address. If you want to see what people in other countries are writing about the app that you are interested in then App Critic is the only app for that. If you want to find apps that are worth purchasing as well as read an in-depth review of the app, then check in here frequently at AppsAddicts.com.