[App Review] Pops – Notification Themes
The Good
The Not So Good
Pops gives you the ability to customize sms, gmail/email, facebook, google+ and instagram (those are just the apps that I have on my phone currently but there are many many more apps that can be customized as well) by choosing a picture, video to alert you when you have a notification from any app that you have chosen to customize.
After downloading this app earlier this week and playing around with it, I decided that it is a really great way to customize your phone in a much more personal way.
Pops gives you the ability to customize SMS, Gmail/email, Facebook, Google+ and Instagram (those are just the apps that I have on my phone currently but there are tons more apps that can be customized as well) by choosing a picture, video to alert you when you have a notification from any app that you have chosen to customize.
Once you download the app and open it up, it prompts for a phone number and sends an access code via SMS – though I cannot seem to figure out what the access code could be for after a cruise through the settings.
There are 4 headings at the top: Featured; Packs; Popular and Settings. Featured will show you the new “Pops” that are available for download on an individual basis. Packs gives you a set of photos with a common theme: 3D, 8bit, Animal toons and Black and White to name a few options. Popular is an easy option to breeze through and shows the most downloaded Pops by other users.
On the bottom of the screen you have options like: “Send Pop” which will allow the user to send a pop to any of their contacts to use which is a cool feature added. After is “Set Pop For” which will list off the users contacts to customize pops for each contact desired one by one. Next is an option where it lists off your previous SMS messages and allows you to set a pop that way. And Finally, my favorite option is the internal photo and video option. Personally, I always gravitate toward these because I get to choose from my own photos and videos to be displayed when I receive a notification from an app or messages.
In the setting menu, the user has the ability to customize many behaviors for how the pops will be displayed. You can choose to have it show on an open screen, it gives a “sleep mode” which means the app won’t show pops between certain times of the day which is a HUGE feature to have. The last thing I need is some obnoxiously funny pop that I have chosen for my roommate popping up while I’m in a meeting with my boss… And not having them pop up for each junk mail message at 2am is also preferred. There is a shuffle option available, and a privacy option which will not display the message content once received.
That all being said, there are a few things I noticed at least from my own user experience. The background is, I currently use: Go Launcher EX, Go SMS Pro and Go Locker and have extensively customized each to my own liking with screens, pop ups, and my own lock screen. The first thing I noticed is that Pops doesn’t exactly play well with some of these… I had to turn off my pop up windows in Go SMS (which I already knew going in, more a formality really) And after some extensive customization and tweaking, I still couldn’t get the app to work quite the way I wanted. I couldn’t make the app wake the screen up to show me the pop when I would receive a notification of some kind. Also, one of the first things I noticed was a decrease in performance on my phone too… Because the app loads many pops inside itself, it spends time loading these each time the phone is unlocked during the setup process.
Chris Bravos
