Kaboom Review

Developer: AnchorFree
Price: FREE
Version Reviewed: 1.0
App Reviewed on: iPhone 5

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Overall Rating:

Kaboom is an app born from the necessity or desire for users to have a little more control over the photos they share. I’m not entirely convinced it succeeds, but it’s an interesting idea nonetheless.

Once you’ve set up an account - it requires you to input your phone number, which feels a bit iffy to be honest - you can start using Kaboom to take and share photos and images from your camera roll. The whole “added control” thing comes into play once the sharing begins. It allows you to post a picture and set a limit to how long it stays up, either by view count or by a specific amount of time.

This is also where my main issues with Kaboom come into play. For starters, the sharing process is a little awkward. Posting a photo creates a special link to the app’s servers, and that link is what ends up being shared to your various accounts. This means that you won’t have a thumbnail showing up in your Twitter timeline, for example. The same goes for Facebook.

And then when you go to view the image in a browser it gets awkwardly cut off (if it’s big enough, which isn’t very big to begin with) by these info bars at the top and bottom of the screen and you have to scroll up and down to see everything. And this leads me to yet another issue: what’s to stop someone from simply taking a screen shot of the image before the link is removed? Or right-click, “save image as” for that matter (yes, this actually works)?

I do think the idea of Kaboom - giving users a sort of self-destruct button for photos they may want to take down - is a solid one. I just don’t think it’s being taken far enough here.