Got Time? is the first, and luckily only, two-month-old creation from app developer Vianki. It can be found by searching Got Time? on the App Store, and is located below the apps Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That! – Soundboard and Famous Cartoon Shadow Quiz.
Vianki promised that Got Time? will, “rather than [force me] to figure out when [I] need to do stuff, track how much free time [I] have left.” Though this sounded promising, when I saw the horribly contrasting yellow-gold and bright purple of the logo, I immediately lowered my expectations.
I tapped the app and what I saw impressed me even less than the logo did. A set of five simplistic, and not intuitively simplistic, screenshots stared back at me. Basic, contrasting colors and what looked to be a default font continued to lower my hopes for the utility of this application. I pressed download.
While I was waiting for the app to finish downloading, I decided to glance at the reviews. It turns out that a glance was all that I needed to get a gist of the what the app would provide, as there were only two reviews.
One review gave Got Time? a single star, while another, in stark contrast, was glowing, declaring in the header that the app was “quick and easy.” Parts of the review reminded me of the description of the app, and I quickly began suspecting that the author was somehow affiliated with Vianki and stood to profit off of enthusiastic app reviews.
Once the app was finally downloaded I was greeted with a large green box that told me “you have no current tasks,” alongside a large ad adorned with a pair of breasts promoting the app Game of War. Initially, I was unsure of what I was supposed to do. Upon closer examination though, I saw three minuscule buttons in the lowest region of the screen.
The only three buttons in the entire app, aside from the buttons you use to toggle the amount of time you see at once, read “Dashboard,” which I was on, “Task List” and “Routine List.” I decided to enter in my weekly routine first.
As I began to add my weekly class schedule, I encountered another small but annoying problem. Once I was done typing in the name of my routine I tapped the “Starts” field to enter the start time, only to find that nothing happened. I tried again and finally realized you must press “Done” on the keyboard first —something that is not at all convenient.
Another annoying aspect was setting the start and end times. Instead of a scroll wheel, users must fight with a slider to select their times. This problem resurfaces in the “Task List” section when entering due dates. Here, a scroll wheel is used when trying to schedule multiple events on top of each other. However, a calendar where all events can be represented next to each other would be more ideal.
A noteworthy feature in the app is a slider that you can adjust based on your progress on a certain task, which seems like a good idea. When entering a task though, you must type the name first, because if you forget, there is no error to alert you, and the task will not save and instead be lost forever. At this point, after I entered a due date for an assignment, the app decided to crash. This was not a one-time crash either — this was a crash where the app would not even re-open and had to be re-downloaded entirely.
To my dismay, all my painstakingly added routines were gone. However, I was determined to see how this app worked and what made it so much better than a normal calendar and to-do list. Once again, I added my routines, and this time, I was able to enter in a few things from my to-do list.
Ten minutes later, I returned to the dashboard and saw a sentence telling me to “Relax” because I had five hours of tasks to complete out of eight hours of free time. This was nice, so I decided to enter in the rest of my to-do list in the task section.
Unfortunately, this was a bad decision because once again, the app crashed and would not re-open. Rather than trying again, because I knew a crash was inevitable, I gave up.
Got Time? is a good idea, but the “unique algorithm” that Vianki flaunts as revolutionary is basic arithmetic. It shows you the time of the day minus the time you estimate you have to work on your tasks. Combining a to-do list and a calendar could be useful but doesn’t present enough benefits to overcome the massive hindrances that this app creates.
I found that I wasted precious time that I could have used to work on assignments while using Got Time?, and until the developers totally revamp this app, it cannot prove useful to any human being. One advantage that Got Time? does have though, is that is available only on the App Store and not the Google Play Store, therefore only wasting the time of a portion of smartphone users.
