Poemhunter

Thank You, this app has the ability to guide a person when in doubt, the wisdom of kind words but true words for whatever path you may encounter. The assurance of why you’ll be ok, and the encouragement of standing up again. I’m amazed by how words can and do affect your every way of living, aa thoughts, sad thoughts, love and being denied thoughts. The feeling is indescribable in every scripture that has been written and that there is Alwaise someone that is in the same path you are going through and to help guide you through it all till the end. I Love every bit of helpful and powerful words. Pls and Thank You. 💜

This app not only tries its best and tries hard to hide all the ads but the poems are of quality. What I mean is that they are not like some person who just made them. If you actually think about the meaning of the poem, it is actually really good! There are new poems everyday and for me that is a good solid app to keep. Sad is that there isn’t any notifications for them to remind that there is a new poem, would like that as a suggestion. But overall, this app is amazing and has changed my life so far, (I got it like a week ago but it seems like forever) I could really see me using this app for a long time!!

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There are two problems with this well-conceived but poorly executed app: the presentation and the selection. Firstly, no matter what poem you get, the verses that ride over the length of your screen do not have their remainder indented on the second line. The second part of the line justifies left, just like a normal line beginning. This (lack of) technique doesn’t just look bad. It makes one struggle to scan where a line ends. The reading experience suffers immensely on a phone screen. (I will leave out my petty font gripes.) Secondly, the selection of poems are completely unfiltered. That doesn’t just mean amateurish, silly, laughable poems sprinkled in among the interesting reads. That means user-submitted transcripts of classic poems riddled with spelling and capitalization errors. An effort at curation would be most welcome. I love the idea of poetry, randomly selected and assigned to you. The exploration, the surprise, and the possibility of discovery are thrilling, like how a Pandora radio list of old may have flung artists you never heard of at you and thereby teach you of a new artist. On top, this app adds the possibility of a contemporary creative community. But this app lacks the features to fulfill such promises.

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I have a lot of add-supported apps, but none are as disruptive of the user experience or as annoying as the ads in Poemhunter. Ads that pop up while I’m searching for a poem are hard to close. The close button is sometimes too small to see and the touch target is impossible to hit. Ads at the bottom of a poem auto play with sound. This is embarrassing when in public and will stop my music or podcast in favor of playing the ad sound. This is not ok. Ads are fine, but these are intrusive. An app should be a pleasure to use regardless of whether or not the user pays for it. Marco Arment’s Overcast is the model for how to implement ads effectively while still making a profit. Try looking there for ad implementation ideas. As it stands, the app is infuriating to use, which is not the mindset I’m going into when I want to read poetry.

Very happy with the wide selection of poets found here, only, I have two suggestions: I would like to have an option to randomly shuffle between my favorited poets and their works, and secondly, I wish the formatting could be better sometimes to show whether a line is being continued onto the next for lack of space, or if it’s indeed where the lines end and begin as the poet intended. This could be fixed easily by indenting any lines following the first when they’re to be read as one.