Review: Flakey Friends – A Social App for People Who ‘Flake’ on Commitments

Review: Flakey Friends – A Social App for People Who ‘Flake’ on Commitments

You get together a group of friends for dinner and there is always the one person that never shows up on time, or at all. Maybe they text you at the last minute to excuse themselves or get out of the obligation, what a “flake!”  Flakey Friends is here to help you call-out your friends in an easy and convenient way.  According to the dev’s “this app is to make your friends realize that they are unreliable and inconsiderate.” …and, it accurately achieves this goal.

Design and Function

Flakey Friends is a very simple app for posting messages about your non-committal friends to Twitter or Facebook.  The interface is set with pre-populated messages to tweet or post at a moments notice.  However, if you would like to be a little more creative, personalized messages can be added to the post window.

After connecting to iPhone’s address book, the app pulls the contact information into the Flakey Friends contacts section, making the app a one-stop-shop for calling-out your friends.  In addition, the app keeps a history count of how many times you have called-out specific friends.  The photos below show the instructions for use, suggested comments, and a final Twitter post.

Currently, there is not a way to see if your friends are also using Flakey Friends.  According to the dev site, this improvement is coming in a future update and will also allow you to see their Flakey Friend feeds from within the app.  Additional improvements include the desire to post on LinkedIn, Foursquare, and Google +.  Finally, another planned improvement is Push Notifications for iOS devices. If the two friends both use Flakey Friends and one comments on the other, the offending Flakey Friend will be notified that he was called-out.

 Conclusion [rating: 3.5/5]

If you need help calling-out your friends, Flakey Friends ($.99, iTunes Link) is your favorite app.  Now, considering all the app does is post a comment about your buddies on Twitter and Facebook, one could forego the $.99 charge and simply do it directly on the social media sites directly.  However, with the promised future updates, I can see the app becoming a more powerful tool and potentially a fun exchange between friends.

Pros

  • Simple user interface
  • Pre-populated insults
  • Post to Facebook and Twitter simultaneously
  • Connects to Address Book

Cons

  • Only allows Facebook and Twitter connection
  • Does not particularly simply posting to Facebook or Twitter
  • Unknown date of future update