Today’s Amazon Free App of the Day is Atriviate, and it’s a great one for trivia buffs and fans of social games like Words With Friends. It has a number of negative reviews, but don’t let them sway you away from trying this terrific app. Here’s are my impressions of Atriviate after playing it myself:
This is like a cross between Words With Friends and Trivial Pursuit. It runs just fine on my Kindle Fire HD, the graphics are sharp, and the questions are challenging but not impossible. All in all, a very good app! Don’t believe the negative reviews that say it has adware and excessive permissions.
While spyware/adware apps may detect adware in the app’s code, that doesn’t mean there are, or ever will be, ads in the app. It’s just a very common practice for developers to create an ad-supported version of their app, then “turn off” the adware part of the code in a second, no-ads version. But some paranoid people assume the presence of the code means it’s only a matter of time before the developer secretly turns the ads on, which is silly, since the whole point of participating in Free App of the Day is to win over new customers who might buy other apps from the same dev. Consumers would specifically avoid other apps from a developer that did that.
As for the permissions, they’re necessary because the game is designed like Words With Friends: you’re supposed to play against another real human being online, whether from Facebook, chosen at random from other app players, or specified by email address. So stuff like internet access, access to contacts and so on really is legitimate in this app.
Note that this app is rated Mature, due to some mature question and answer content. From Amazon:
Have fun answering questions and compete against your friends online! More than 5,000 questions and periodic updates. Walk the board using special boxes to get all the stars. Entertain yourself while expanding your knowledge with 7 classical categories: Geography, Sports, Entertainment, Art and Literature, Science and Technology, History and Everything.
New rules, like stealing stars and the Challenge, make the game much more competitive. Find your friends on Facebook and challenge them to a game. Earn medals and post them on Facebook for everyone to see who is the smartest one. Atriviate is a quiz game with a Trivial Pursuit style, with more than 5,000 questions, where two player can play games online, competing to see who knows more. You can add random players, make friends or choose your Facebook mates, and have as many simultaneous games as you want.
With the new board of Atriviate, you can take advantage of special boxes and get all the stars to win the game. Furthermore, Atriviate has new rules, such as the possibility of stealing stars to your opponent, or the Challenge, where you compete to see who hits more questions, which gives the game a more strategic and competitive aspect.
Atriviate: get it today, while it’s Amazon’s Free App of the Day.