Chorus for iPhone: Cool in Principle; Lame in Implementation
By: Hillel Fuld
When I review apps or products in general, I have been known to go to extremes. I either love it or hate it, and there is a reason for that. A product that does not excite me either for the good or bad, does not warrant a review in my opinion. There are over 100,000 apps in the App Store, I cannot possibly review them all, so I review the ones I love… or hate. In this case, however, it is different. This app, Chorus, is a great concept. I love the idea, but as soon as I opened the app, I was disappointed…
The app fills a real gap in the industry of mobile software. With hundreds of thousands of apps in the various app stores, there is no great way to hear about new and exciting apps. I use Twitter for that, but not everyone is following 5,000 geeks who are constantly talking about the newest app. So, Chorus addresses this issue, or at least tries to, by tapping into your social network, and providing a feed of what your connections are saying about which apps. Great idea, right?
Like I said, it is a great idea, but the app turned out to be useless to me. When you open the app, you can sign up for a Chorus account, so far so good. Now, before I go on, let me just say one thing that is a rule of thumb for all developers. Your app might offer tons of features, and it might be clear to you how to operate the app, but if the user cannot figure it out by themselves, you might as well not have the feature available.
So once logged in, you are presented with a main screen that has four tabs on top and five on the bottom. The top four are called All, Posts, Reviews, and Downloads. The bottom five are Feeds, Friends, My Profile, Apps, and Search. Most of the tabs are pretty self explanatory, but the difference between posts and reviews or Feeds and Apps was completely unclear to me, before and after I used the app. The only screen I found useful was the Apps screen where I can see recommended apps categorized by Latest, Paid, or Free, something I thought was missing from the rest of the interface.
As for adding friends, this feature was also useless to me. There is no way to add all your Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn friends at once, and if there is, I missed it, so what’s the point? Most people have enough Facebook friends that they would find it annoying to add all of them one by one. Under the Friends tab, I already had some people who were listed as my friends, not sure where they came from.
From what I understand, this app only works if you have other friends using it. I guess in theory, if I had hundreds of friends who were interested in writing reviews of mobile apps, this would work, but I do not know anyone that does. I can go on forever about the problems I had with this app, but I wont. I will sum it up and say that I understand the app works on some kind of very advanced technology (proprietary Social Genome technology) to provide you information about your friends’ app preferences, but all I came away with was the fact that the interface was all over the place and provided me with no extra value whatsoever.
So like I said, I usually love or hate apps, but with Chorus, I loved the idea, but hated the experience.
Our Rating: 2/5
Developer: Envio
