Pointless App Review: Lindsay Lohan Special takes ridiculous to a new level

June 3, 2010 - By Justin E. Gehrke

There are over 1,000,000 apps in Apple’s iTunes Store. There are health-related ones, like the All-in Fitness Pedometer, which functions as a pedometer and calculates the number of calories you burn. There are apps, like Ace Budget and Bill Tracker, which help you manage your finances. Even still, there are utility apps, such as Battery Life Pro, which help you maximize your iPhone’s battery life. Then, as most iPhone users know, there are the ridiculous apps. These are the ones that, after spending $0.99 out of sheer curiosity, you walk away feeling like the developer should have paid you for the waste of your precious time.

The Lindsay Lohan Special app for iPhone is one of these apps. Right up front, we’ll say it. Ridiculous is not an accurate word to describe it. The dictionary definition of ridiculous says it can mean “stupid” or “funny”. This word and definition don’t adequately describe the Lohan app. It’s not funny, and it is beyond stupid. So, in an effort to accurately describe it, we pulled out the thesaurus and tossed around alternatives like absurd, derisory, farcical, ludicrous, and preposterous. Unfortunately, none of these truly do the app justice, either. Do you want to understand why? Well, read on and feel our pain. Hang tight because there is a lesson involved.

The Web 2.0 effect on the icon is the most exciting thing about this app.

The first thing you see after purchasing this app is the warning shown on the screen below. While the images might be risque for some, the ridiculousness of them trumps that several times over. Truthfully, the disclaimer should read: “…contains no actual material. Click OK to confirm you understand that downloading this app may actually reduce your IQ by several points.”

After the app downloads, you see the nice, Web 2.0 icon shown in the first image, above. Tapping on it reveals…. Okay, the work reveals suggests you are going to see something interesting. Let’s just say that the app opens. When it does, what do you see? You’re shown a photo of Lindsay Lohan. How does it work? To change the current image, just touch swipe the bottom of the screen. The thumbnails appear, and you can…select another Lindsay Lohan picture.

When you find a photo that’s interesting (which we didn’t), you tap the thumbnail and it goes into full screen mode. You can even tap the “Download” soft key to save it to your iPhone’s Photos folder. That’s it. It doesn’t do anything else. We tried to find something. It just isn’t there.

Will it work on the iPad? It probably will, if your iPad is jailbroken and has FullForce installed. We don’t know, and we’re not willing to find out. For that matter, we won’t even go into a pros and cons of this app. There are no real pros to the app. There are actually no cons either. What are we going to say? It didn’t crash the iPhone? It didn’t bully our other iPhone apps. For that reason, we’ll just move right on to the summary of this pointless app review.

To be fair, we didn’t expect there to be anything groundbreaking or innovative about this app. We did assume that it would offer something other than pictures that we could have found on Google Images and turned into our own iPhone backgrounds (if we actually wanted to do that…which we don’t.). If the developer had at least thrown in some actual information, such as a bio, film/music credits, or a timeline of her legal history, it might be considered useful…at least in a game of Scene It, with a question about the remake of The Parent Trap. Even a few paparazzi photos would have at least made it amusing to look at once.

To this end, we realize it is meant to be an entertainment app. Unfortunately, we didn’t find the entertaining portion. Our only guess is that it must have fallen out during the download of the app, from the iTunes Store.

After downloading it, browsing through it (very quickly), and taking some screenshots, the Lindsay Lohan Special app was immediately deleted from the iPhone. Even though it’s gone, the iPhone seems to still feel a little….well…offended for having downloaded it in the first place. We may have to go past a normal restoration from backup and go for a full reset to the original factory version. Maybe then the iPhone will be able to forget what it has seen. Unfortunately, we probably never will.

So, what was the lesson we promised? It is the knowledge that this app is pointless, and, unless you are a family member of Lohan’s who wants pictures of her on their iPhone, it is useless. Oh, by the way…and for what it’s worth…we want our $0.99 back.

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Source: (Here is where we would normally provide a download link to the app. You get the point.)