How to judge an app in five minutes

Minute one: the listing, not the screenshots

Screenshots are marketing and they are supposed to be. The useful parts of a store listing are the boring parts: the in-app purchase line, the last update date, the size, and the compatibility notes.

The update date is the single most informative field. An app last touched two years ago may still work perfectly, and for a simple utility that is fine. For anything that syncs, connects to a service, or handles your files, a long silence is a warning.

Minute two: the permissions

Read what it wants and match each item to a feature you can name. A photo editor wanting photo access is obvious. A photo editor wanting contacts is not, and the burden of explanation sits with the app.

Modern phones let you grant most permissions at the moment they are needed rather than up front, and the moment of asking is informative in itself. An app that asks for everything on first launch, before you have done anything, has told you how it thinks.

Minute three: the paywall

Find it deliberately. Open the app and go looking for the upgrade screen rather than waiting for it. You want to know three things: the real price, the billing period, and what the free version keeps.

Pay attention to how the price is displayed. A yearly plan shown as a small monthly figure, with the annual charge in lighter type below, is a presentation choice. It is legal and extremely common, and it is worth doing the multiplication yourself before deciding.

Minute four: the exit

Before you commit anything you would mind losing, find out how to get it back out. Look for an export option in settings. If there is none, assume there is none, because a promise to add one later is not a feature.

This matters most for notes, tasks, logs and libraries, which are exactly the categories people stay in for years. It matters least for a converter you will use twice.

Minute five: the recent reviews

Sort by most recent and read ten. You are not looking for a verdict. You are looking for repetition: the same crash, the same missing region, the same feature that broke in the last update.

One angry review is noise. The same specific complaint from four people in one month is a fact about the software, and it is usually the fact that would have annoyed you in week three.

Why this works

None of these steps requires you to know anything about the category. They are all checks on how the app is built and sold rather than on what it claims to do, and those are the things that decide whether you are still using it at the end of the month.

Appiqon is a paid membership. This website is promoted by Globway International B.V., which receives a commission from our partners when someone signs up through a link here. This page names no apps and endorses no products; it describes how to judge them for yourself.

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