The Worst Apple App Of The Day: Starbucks

The Apple (AAPL) App Store has about 150,000 applications which have been downloaded more than 3 billion times. Most of the apps are free, but some cost $50 or more.

24/7 Wall St. has begun to look at the products in the App Store to see which ones, especially from large companies, work the most poorly.

The Starbucks application barely works at all in many cases, at least its most “valuable” feature which is its store locator.

24/7 Wall St. tested the Starbucks App in a number of spots around New York City, in each case making certain that the AT&T (T) 3G network was working well. The App asked if it could use the “current location” of the iPhone to look for stores. In each case, it took over a minute to get the GDP to set the location. In situations were a search for stores was in areas where there were relatively few Starbucks, the feature returned results in less than 30 seconds.

Looking for stores in crowded cities with a number of Starbucks stores was another matter.The search took over a minute and in some cases the “map” feature of the application simply go stuck and could not show locations at all.

Douglas A. McIntyre