According to PCWorld there are over 400,000 apps – including Android and iphone varieties. Of those 400,000, just over 5000 are business related. All the developers say their app is the best. Your colleagues say their favorites are the best and no matter how much time you spend on your smartphone, you could never download, try out and review each one. That is what tech review sites are for, right? Well, in this compilation we have endeavored to bring together some of the lowest rated business apps available. Bear in mind that reviews are drawn from real users who offered their own opinion on the product. Not a single smartphone or developer was harmed during our research process.

CheckSheet

This is an app aimed at increasing productivity through managing to-do lists, document manipulation and contact management. The interface is not intuitive at all. The developer’s website does not provide assistance on how to complete tasks or even use the app. It only tells you what can be done, not how to do it. It was given a two star rating by PCWorld reviewers.

DocScanner

Why are there smartphone apps? Because they offer services not currently existing on the smartphone. DocScanner does not fall into this category. It snaps a picture of the document, allows you to re-size it and then attach to an email. There is no ability to convert the document to text, adjust the quality, or the edit document itself. In other words, it does exactly the same thing as a built in smartphone camera. Don’t bother with this one.

Hire Me!

Somewhere in our lives we were taught not to judge a book by its cover. Unfortunately we all know that everyone does judge everyone and everything by their appearance. First impressions are incredibly valuable. As an app aimed at helping users win a job, Hire Me! should be terminated. The title screen greets you with a grammatical error, foreshadowing the quality of the rest of the app: “Tap anywhere your screen to generate an interview question”. Beyond the random interview questions designed to get you comfortable with answering them, there is not much else. Oh, except for the how-to videos on tying a tie.

Contact Spy

Contact Spy is designed to help you spy on those in your contact list. By ‘spy’ we mean track their personal contact information, previous addresses, image searches or whatever else a simple Google search can come up with. The fact that Contact Spy is listed as under the business category is a tad dubious, but it is likely this was done as a means of legitimizing its (limited) abilities. Putting public privacy and moral obligations aside, Contact Spy has a few key flaws. The key problem is the lack of depth in search results – there are no secondary searches, just Google. Other people-search sites are not integrated into the app, not even use of the built in iphone geo-location features. If you are looking for more information on your contacts, you will get better results by just asking them than you will by using Contact Spy.

Invoice 2Go

For those of you whose daily work lives are filled with customer invoices and quotes, a mobile way of drawing up these documents is a huge time saver. How great would it be to have an iphone app where you can compose the estimate and email it to your client as soon as you get in the truck? This is the app that Invoice2Go proposes to be. Unfortunately, for an iphone app they have completely alienated Apple users. In order for the app to work best, a Windows desktop platform must be downloaded first. Invoice2Go works without it, but not well. The lack of an Apple platform leads to bigger and more annoying issues. For example when sending an invoice to another iphone (or Mac) user, the document comes up totally unreadable. The formatting is askew and the legibility is childlike. A hand written, carbon copy estimate or invoice would be more professional than one created by Invoice2Go.

Have you encountered a bad Android or iphone app? Get the word out, write a review – save your fellow smartphone users from the same bad experience. What comes around, goes around.

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