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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.

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.

Maybe I didn’t give it enough time, but I deleted the app after a few days because every poem that came up on random shuffle was seriously mediocre. I was hoping for poems by both classic and contemporary poets who I hadn’t heard before, which is kind of what’s advertised, but all I got were clearly amateurs. The last straw was one full of misspellings that were not, as far as I could tell, a style choice. It may be what other people are looking for, but I didn’t find it worth my time. (The UI is nice, at least.)