Upgrades: Unlikely

Dear iPhone application developers,

Starting last week, if you have a free application, I will not update it. This decision might end up biting me in the ass, but frankly, I don't care. More often than not these days, a really cool game or app will come out. I'll love it and think about buying the full version but before I get around to it, an update will come out and add all kinds of deblilitating ads to it or force me to create a login to play the game.

These 'undocumented features' were not mentioned in the update information, but when the application opens, I might not get to play the game unless I sign up for some "community" or sit through an ad.

I call out the application "Sheep Launcher" as the most grotesque example of "ad siege" only because they combined it with a new game feature that made the game so unplayable, you had to see the ad more than the game. Originally, the game was cute and simple. You press the button and the sheep gets launched into the sky, you tap the sheet whenever it looks like he's about to fly off the bottom of the screen to keep him bouncing ever upward. After the "update" the gameplay included an ad screen after every death that lasted something like 10 second, and a "feature" that made tilting the phone only slightly force the sheep to shift in mid-flight, making it almost impossible to tell where he would come down.
this guaranteed the game wouldn't last more than 30 seconds ago and then you'd have to sit through an equally painful ad. I did this for about 3 minutes until I finally gave up. I told my girlfriend not to upgrade and had to play on her phone because - oh no - you can't roll back updates on an iphone app. We immediately wrote new reviews of the update and waited for the next update. When it came, Kronos, the game's creators, had listened. They took out SOME of the ads and allowed you to scale down the tilt effects so that the game was playable. To add to that, they actually added some Christmas customizations that are kind of cute. For this, I applaud them, but the mistake caused me to not buy their game (yet), write a negative review, and apparently caused it to PLUMMET out of the top 25.

But that was only the first update problem. The second came from simple game Mazefinger, by NGMoco, who updated their game with a community feature that couldn't be circumvented. Again I was forced to play the older version on my girlfriend's phone, but it definitely prevented me from buying the game.

Shortly thereafter, I started re-reading all game reviews before I upgraded and sure enough, developers were grudge-fucking the players of their free games, hoping that they would force an upgrade. To make it more ludicrous, games that would NEVER need an upgrade were coming out with them just for the purposes of adding ads to my pleasant experience. What possible upgrade could "bubble-wrap" provide other than ads? Then stakes are low enough that if my bubble wrap application ever froze or broke (it didn't), I would probably not shed any tears over it.

Finally, I reached a point where I was tired of digging into every upgrade to see if there were any reviews saying how much the new unannounced ad experience was. The ONLY upgrade notice that included a warning about new Ads that I could find was "iDoodle2" and the disclosure nearly caused me to shell out for the full version. I decided I was probably not going to upgrade any applications (despite the ugly 16 notifications to do so on my home screen) for the foreseeable future. Exceptions would be made, but generally for the most egregious cases, or apps that I paid for with no fear of experience damage.

In case you think I'm just some complaining freeloader, I DO buy apps I like, but not those who screw me after a few uses with an ad solution that basically cripples the user experiences.

Recent purchases include Air Mouse, Spongebob, Fling, Physics, Lineup Pro, Voices, T-Pain, Red Laser, Food Scanner, Speakeasy (right before iPhone 3.0) and iPhyzzle2. I'll be reviewing those and other free games too, but if the free games screw the user with an upgrade, I'm going to write a new review to replace the old one.