gaming simplified

What positive thing could I say about Words with Friends? Well, it allows Android users and iOS users to play Scrabble against each other. And if I were to only talk about how Scrabble-like Words with Friends is, then it’s a damn fine clone of the classic board game. Unfortunately, Words with Friends on Android is riddled with bugs that totally ruin the experience.

Design wise, Words with Friends is visually appealing and responds to input fairly nicely, that is, when it’s not loading a screen. Zynga programmed the game in a way where, upon initial launch, the app must send a wave to the server and see if there are any updates to any of the games that are currently being played. This is understandable, but this check can take a while depending on your signal strength. Even with my Nexus S on T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network (full bars), it took up to a minute to check the status of 6 games. A minute to load something on a mobile device feels like ages to the user, and should be considered unacceptable.

Even more unacceptable is the fact that your Settings are stored in the cloud, thus you’ll have to wait for the app to load your settings before you can make any changes. In versions previous to the build that I’m reviewing, version 3.34, this took up to 2 minutes to load! As of 3.34, the load times are bearable – no more than 5 seconds. Though, why should I wait at all for a Settings screen to load?

While I’m talking about Settings, it’s interesting to note that Zynga doesn’t follow Google’s style guide for Android. Every Android device has a dedicated Menu button, where upon being pressed, should open the app’s menu. Normally this is where an on-screen button pops up so the user can access Settings. Words with Friends has no functionality mapped to the Menu button, instead the Settings button is located at the bottom of the “Your Move” tab.

Also, on the Settings screen there is an option called Background Notifications where you can set how often the app will check for game move updates. I found that setting this to Never resulted in the app notifying me every single time someone made a move. It even notified me when someone didn’t make a move. Now, shouldn’t ‘Never’ mean that there are zero background notifications?

My biggest complaint about Words with Friends on Android, are the constant and consistent crashes (in Android terminology, crashes are where the app has stopped responding and the OS has forced them to close). These crashes happen on every third time that you launch the app, give or take an app launch. This would be fine if you could just simply re-launch the app and start playing, but instead of that, when you re-launch the app it informs you that it was forced closed and needs to be restarted. After it restarts, you find that it deleted all the local data and you have to sign into your Words with Friends account and wait for the data to be synced from the cloud.

With all the constant crashing, all the load times, and the ads after each move you make, Words with Friends makes up for one of the most annoying experiences on Android. It’s quite possibly the one of the worst programmed apps available on Android Market.

For this review, Words with Friends (version 3.34) was played on a Samsung Nexus S with Android 2.3.2.