AppZilla 2 is one of those jack-of-all-trades apps, squeezing 120 little mini-apps into one place.
Tap it, and it grinds open with a dramatic kzzzzzzrrr-tang sound. Inside, you see a springboard-within-a-springboard, with pages of apps to mess around with.
There’s all kinds of stuff in there. Camera apps, sounds apps, word apps, joke apps, utilities apps. You name it, it’s probably inside AppZilla. A bargain, right?
Here’s the thing, though: in the time it takes you to hit the AppZilla icon, wait for AppZilla to do its kzzzzzzrrr-tang thing, flick to the AppZilla mini app that you want (assuming you can remember where it is), and open it – well, you might as well have just used a standard app. You’d probably have got to it quicker.
AppZilla’s offerings are somewhat variable. Some are so simple you might find yourself wondering if you’ve missed something. The Bug Zapper, for example: is it really just a glowing blue thing that makes bzzzt noises? Yes.
Other apps are frustratingly cumbersome to use. Face FX lets you tweak photos of people’s faces, but rather than simply touching and swiping, as you can with most similar apps, you have to use a drop-down menu to select the effect you want, move the target to the right position, and hit the “Apply” button. It requires too many taps, and sucks the fun out of making your loved ones look dumb.
That’s not to say there’s nothing useful inside AppZilla. There are some useful widgets: virtual dice, a metronome, a moon phase calculator, stuff like that. But a lot of them can be found elsewhere on your iDevice, on the internet, or on the App Store.
Let’s face it: for a dollar, you’ve not got a lot to lose. And if your kids are pestering you for apps that do even one of the things inside AppZilla, it might make sense to get it for them. You might be better off working out the one or two functions you really need, and spending a dollar or so on apps that do just those things.
[xrr rating=50%]
