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FEATURE

How to Make a Bad App

Creating the world's worst app requires a lot of effort

Issue: 19.5 (September/October 2021)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 30,369
Starting Page Number: 28
Article Number: 19503
Related Web Link(s):

http://www.imdb.com

Excerpt of article text...

There are many articles that purport to tell you how to make a "great" app. You need to do this or that, and bla bla bla. But how many tutorials are there on how to make a bad app?

Creating a bad app is harder than it sounds. It takes real effort. A poor app is easy—just don't try very hard to make a good one. Use a generic icon, put lots of spelling and grammatical errors in your description, don't fix bugs, create a confusing interface, have it not really function as described, etc.

A bad app, on the other hand, doesn't necessarily make those mistakes. A bad app sounds good and in many ways is a good app—it's just that it makes deliberate choices to ruin the experience for other motivations (financial gain, ease of creation, etc.)

Now you're probably asking why you need a lesson in creating a bad app as you don't plan to do that. But that's the thing—learning how to create a bad app will help you avoid doing it!

So let's get started.

But first note that the fictional app I'm describing isn't fictional. It's a real app and I'm not exaggerating how bad it is. I will let you know the name of the app later in the article, but in the meantime, see if you can guess!

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