ios apps

Starbucks Pick of the Week (free song): The Lumineers

Posted on by GumballsPlaysGames

If you haven’t found a good reason to install the Starbucks app on your phone, I’m about to give you a good reason to do so. Not only can you use it as a quick and easy way to pay for your daily dose of caffeine (and earn rewards doing so), you can also download a free song every week via iTunes. It’s simple, you get a message titled ‘Pick of the Week’ every week and you simply click a button which will take you to iTunes and start your free download. Recent weeks have featured songs by Dave Matthews Band, Black Prairie and Van Morrison.

This week’s pick is by far my favorite, and I have fallen in love with this band which I discovered via Starbucks. The band is The Lumineers out of Colorado, whose album (The Lumineers) debuted this past April (check it out on iTunes). The song is “Stubborn Love” which you can see in the video below. It’s an amazing song, and a great video!

 

Family Feud and Friends

Posted on by GumballsPlaysGames

So a lot of people at work have been playing Family Feud & Friends on their phone and it seemed like a fun time. It’s certainly fun to battle it out with strangers and come up with “good answer”(s). However after downloading the free app myself I’ve run into nothing but problems.

First off, the game requires coins to play, and each game of Family Feud costs 2 coins. You start out with 10 coins and get 2 coins for leveling up (you level up by earning money). However after no more than 20 minutes I was zero balance on my coins. So I have the option of paying anywhere from $1.99-$99.99 for additional coins. $1.99 will net you a total of FIVE games of Family Feud, or 15 minutes or so of fun. Most definitely not worth it. And anyone who spends $99.99 on an iPhone game (or even thinks about it for that matter) needs some help.

Every day you get to spin a slot machine to earn more coins, but most often you’ll only get 2 or 3 coins. So you can play one game a day if you don’t shell out cash.

What’s worse is the fact that the app itself never works. Most of the time I open the app I get a never ending connecting to server and an error saying the app failed to retrieve information from the server, try again later. Great so I can’t even get my daily spin to earn free coins so I can actually play the game.

This in app purchase model is not a winning model. I would rather pay $2-5 for the app then have to continuously dump $2-5 a day into it. Even if you bought the $99 coin package I doubt that would last a person a year. What a shame, the game is fun, but it apparently doesn’t want to be played.