SpiderPig

Features

SpiderPig is an extensive communication app which allows people to message each other, send photos, voice message, group chat, and share location information. The app’s description page states that it is the “genuine real-time GPS messenger,” which is doesn’t clearly state what the app is or why GPS information is necessary.

Fundamentally it sounds great to have all of your friend’s locations available while chatting with them (should they choose to share it), but when you think about this feature it doesn’t seem so helpful after all. Should you need to meet with a friend, you can just ask them over text message where they’re at. Also, it’s much quicker to ask your friend where they’re at than to have all of your friends download SpiderPig and enable location sharing everytime you want to meet them.

And if SpiderPig isn’t meant for using your friend’s location to meet up with them, than the question would be “what is it meant for?” Is SpiderPig an app that just plots the location of friends on a map because it looks cool? If that’s the case, than it would be quite a worrisome software mission. Whereas apps like Whatsapp and Skype are successful and useful to people because they make communicating easy and free over WiFi, apps like SpiderPig are confusing and not clearly beneficial.

In the chat listing for example that displays all ongoing chats with friends, you can see exactly how far they are from you in terms of miles or kilometers. It’s not quite clear why such information would be helpful. Maybe it is to some friends.

Mission Accomplished

The user interface of this app is really great. The chat design is clean and modern, even the colors are bright and every part of the app looks elegant. The GPS “spider” lined graphics also look cool when you use the app to see how far away your friends are from you. And the GPS information is all accurate.

Room to improve

As mentioned above, the app functions very well but it’s not clear if it has a good purpose or solves a problem friends may have while communicating. As it stands, iOS has its own location sharing feature as well as voice messaging, WiFi messaging, and group chats. That makes this app not very useful, and more like a duplication of iOS features rather than a useful add-on.

Conclusion

Using iMessage and the built-in location sharing features of iOS makes more sense than downloading this app and inviting all of your friends over to it. Unless you invite your friends to it, you won’t be able to see their locations. Also, since the app doesn’t provide much value, it’s unlikely that most people would keep the app on their phone. This means that even after inviting friends to the app, it’s unlikely they will continue using it.