Add a little silliness to your ghostly celebrations
Price: $1/£1
Version: 1.0
Size: 84.5 MB
Developer: Joseph Peaden
Platform: iPhone / iPad
You may think that the spookiest thing about Halloween is your uncle Jack dressed up as a sexy kitten at that party you can’t even remember inviting him to. But what’s spookier is how quickly gimmicky apps can rise up the ranks in the App Store.
The ghost detector has 3 modes
So as we are not far out from the scariest day of the year (depending on when you read this) we decided to check Apple’s app abattoir for something tediously Halloween related. Lo and behold, like the ghosts it claims to detect, one app jumped out – leaving us questioning what is even real anymore.
The app is aptly named Ghost Detector and it’s somehow made it on to the App Store’s top charts for paid apps. But let’s clear this up straight away, it absolutely does not do what it says on the tin. This little piece of software that hopes to become a leading force in any amateur ghost hunter’s arsenal of ghost hunting apparatus is pure silliness.
The radar doesn’t do much…
Thankfully, though, it is silly and simple enough that it didn’t take us more than 10 seconds to find we’d been woefully conned out of our precious 99 cents – and we didn’t especially mind, either. Was anyone really expecting the dark secrets of the afterlife to be found on the App Store?
So how does it (not) work? On opening the app you’re provided with 3 tools to help track down those pesky phantoms: radar, thermal and touch. Let’s go deep.
Touch doesn’t do much either…
So. If you tap the radar button you are presented with an animation of the kind of radar you’d see in a 1980s kids cartoon set under the sea. It’s basic stuff – so basic in fact, that we couldn’t spot one ghost using the radar.
On to the next tool – let’s try touch. Opening up this mode presents you with an all-red screen that you can… touch. Pressing the screen reveals a fingerprint, fires a little pinging sound and vibrates your device a little. Neat… but we’re not sure how this detects ghosts.
Wait… is that… is that a ghost? No. It’s a dog… drat
Now on to thermal. Tapping this opens up your device’s camera presenting you with a view of what’s in front of you in a variety of bizarre colors. Now, this is the only one which prompted much excitement from us. The way the colors blend and meld provides a spooky multi-colored mash up of reality. We even started to think we might actually see a ghost, but more than that, there was a nervousness attached to the idea that a phantom might steadily come to view, or we’d turn a corner and see a big green figure turning away from us.
Sadly, we were unable to detect any ghosts while using this app despite trying to detect them in a house over 100 years old. Very disappointing.
Gardens are where spookies usually hang out, right? Maybe not…
But of course, this is just a piece of silliness and proof of the wide variety of nonsense the App Store is still capable of throwing up. This is the kind of app that children will find fascinating at any time of year – while the app may never show anything ethereal, it’s a reasonable piece of fun to crack out at a Halloween party.