The lover's guide to Valentine's Day apps

A selection of apps to boost excitement for the day of romance
Click the subsequent thumbnails to view the app reviews.

Click the subsequent thumbnails to view the app reviews.

  • Click the subsequent thumbnails to view the app reviews.
  • <h2>Love Song 100</h2> Dinner table set, candles lit, lights dimmed, and fine dining just about ready. Now add ‘Love Song 100’ to maintain the mood with a selection of what CyMobile has decided are the top 100 love songs of all time. Despite the cheesiness implied by both the title and description, the app is well built and features a compilation of well known tracks spanning across several decades. The best part is that it is all free and does not require any sort of registration or social media sharing. Songs are presented in one long list which shows the title and author. There is adequate spacing between each song making it simple to scroll and read. Unfortunately, there is no search function, nor any categories by which to browse. What’s the catch? The songs are not actually built into the app. Once a song is selected and the play button tapped, the app redirects you to YouTube. This means that you are unable to press play and forget about music for the rest of the evening. Instead, you must tap the back button after each song concludes. Despite this, the app can still be useful as a suggestion list for pre-dinner preparation. For example, you could scroll through the list and discover songs of which you didn’t previously know. In a lot of cases, CyMobile has linked the song to a video with lyrics on screen, too, so you don’t get in any hot water for miscalculating the message of a track.
  • <h2>Love Test Calculator</h2> Have you ever questioned whether your partner is your ideal match, or if you are wasting your time and should be in a pub finding ‘the one’? Well, there is no better way to decide if you should maintain your relationship with a significant other who you love than to leave it up to some mathematics based on letters and numbers in an app that has no access to your persona or context. The ‘Love Test Calculator’ app is “an extraordinary tool that gives you the keys to a successful relationship,” according to developer, AMALtd. The app is divided into four areas: Calculator, Test, Challenge, and Tender Words. Calculator asks you to input your and another person’s first and last names and date of birth, and then calculates your compatibility as a percentage. It also provides some ‘Details’ of the result which dictates what your relationship will be like. The other features are self-explanatory. Test offers two different quizzes which again use your answers and a bit of math to produce an analysis of your relationship. Challenge is a mini-game where questions are generated for one person which the other must answer to identify who remembers/knows what about their partners. Tender Words offers a series of words that you would probably be too embarrassed to tell your friends you spoke. While it does provide a bit of a laugh, we recommend you do not file for divorce because you score poorly. In terms of functionality, the app is average. Load times are probably a bit higher than they should be. Additionally, an ad pop-up appears far too frequently, and the developer constantly asks for donations which adds to load times.
  • <h2>Valentines Day Love Quotes</h2> So you have been with your partner for a decade, and let’s face it, you’re not saying anything they haven’t previously heard. The ‘Valentines Day Love Quotes’ app, by Skol Labs LLC, is designed to eliminate this problem. While the name suggests the app lists a range of quotes, it goes one better to put these on images. The app allows you to browse these by either category or colour. The free version of the app only allows five photos to be saved per day, but we found a little trick. By pressing the ‘i’ (information) button below the image, a URL appears from where the picture is sourced. By following the link, you are taken directly to the Web site where you can save as many as you want and build your arsenal of romantic (awkward) things to say.
  • <h2>Bubble Blast Valentine</h2> What better way to get right into the Valentine’s Day spirit than making hearts explode? The ‘Bubble Blast Valentine’ game allows just that. This app, by Magma Mobile, is a puzzle game where a selection of hearts are scattered across the screen. The objective is to make each one of these blow up by causing a chain reaction. Each differently coloured heart has a different life value. For example, the red heart has can be tapped once before it explodes and sends mini hearts flying up, down, left and right. Once one of these mini hearts hits another, that heart loses one value. So if another red heart is hit, it will explode to the same effect. There are two game modes. Puzzle and Arcade modes. Puzzle mode, which has 5000 levels, asks you to burst all hearts in a certain number of touches. The first 20 are easy, usually requiring only a single touch, although the game does become more complicated and mathematical as you progress. The game does have hints, but only one can be used every 24 hours. Arcade mode is just as challenging. Each level allows 10 touches, with the goal of using as little of these as possible in order to attain the highest score possible. When you trigger chain reactions in this mode, you are granted additional touches.
  • <h2>Conversation Starter Help</h2> While we are all caught up in Valentine’s Day, we seem to forget the date couples as Single’s Awareness Day. ‘Conversation Starter Help’, from Eric Ingland, is here for the cause. The app contains “hundreds of preloaded conversation starters” to inspire a chat with the person three seats down from you, wherever you may be. The ideas are sorted into multiple categories, with the option for ‘all’ also available. You can either spam the ‘next’ button and move chronologically, or go for the ‘random’ choice. A lot of the conversation starters we saw were viable and ranged from initial introductions to personal inquiries, making the app useful in various contexts and for different purposes. The suggestions are also presented neatly; the font is white and a decent side on a navy background.
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Valentine’s Day: when the price of roses faces chronic inflation, restaurants overflow, and diamonds seem like a good idea.

While the holiday carries a range of traditions, the proliferation of mobility in combination with third party app developers has created a plethora of new possibilities to spruce (cheese) it up a bit.

Here is our compilation of apps that will instil some additional... excitement... into your Valentine’s Day romanticising, and there is also something for those celebrating Single’s Awareness Day.

Note: All apps were installed from the Google Play Store (and are free) and tested on the Samsung Galaxy Note II.

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