Likewise: Movie, TV, Book Recs 12+

I love this app

Honestly, I’m a movie buff and love re-watching the same movies with new perspectives. Sometimes it's hard to remember all of my favorite movies or tv shows. I use this app to save shows that I've watched, want to watch, or rewatch. I love the grouping of recommendations based on your saves, for example, “my favorite comedy shows and movies.” I tend to do this on my own time, but I think it could go further, like when I'm in the mood for empowering movies with a strong female lead in business. It could, for example, recommend The Devil Wears Prada and The Intern, two of my favorites. Or if I want to watch movies based in Paris, it could group recommend Pixar's Ratatouille with another Paris-based movie. Or even groupings based on classic chick flicks. I understand this would take a lot more time, and you would probably would to have someone physically creating collections, as opposed to Ai like I think it is now. But hey, if you're interested in I’m all on board. Overall I love this app. It’s free, and if you watch movies or tv shows, I don’t see any reason not to use it!

Hit or Miss

Some of the features on this app are pretty good. I especially like the option to ask specific questions and get recommendations from other users. But when it comes to the “today” page, it’s a complete hit or miss. Some days they’ll only show me 3 or 4 movies, and none of them will be even close to things I like (which is super frustrating because you have to wait a full 24 hours for new ones.) But other days I’ll get 6 or 7 that are great. It’s also annoying that they ask me to choose from podcasts every day, even though I clearly don’t like podcasts, as I haven’t saved a single one. Yet they will show me literally zero books, even though I have multiple lists full of novels. Basically, the user recommendation feature is great, but the algorithm is mediocre at best. Beyond that, this app also just has a bunch of little problems that altogether make it annoying to use. The biggest one is that if your post exceeds a certain character limit, it just shows a “...” but there’s no way to view the full thing. You also can’t comment on a move or book unless you’ve liked it, and it sometimes crashes. It’s also pretty stupid that they mark it as 12+ but if you aren’t at least 13 you can’t even make an account, this didn’t effect me but it did effect my brother and that’s just dumb. Among other smaller problems. Just needs some updating for sure.

Developer Response ,

Hi Raven! We sincerely appreciate your detailed feedback and sharing your experience. Some of the issues you've pointed out are things we're working on resolving, and hope to have them fixed soon! If you have any questions on the new update that would help with your experience, please feel free to write to support@likewise.com so we may assist you. Your experience using the app and navigating around it is very important to us!

Good but with a few flaws

It’s got all the books you can think of in its database, some without the covers loaded though. And the community is active. The app is easy to work with and simple. It’s good and less text heavy than Goodreads. Overall, I think it’s a fun app with a few flaws.

The recommendation system is rudimentary. For one, there are people of all age ranges on the app from juvenile to adult. The app takes no data of age so it’s easy a juvenile to ask for recommendations and receive something out of their age range. I’m not asking for exact age at all or even related to people but age ranges would be nice on asks or discussion pages. I have not given recommendations before because I wondered if the person I was giving the recommendation to wanted a book for a younger person or older person.

Their compatibility system isn’t great at actual compatibility. They use genres as a measure for how similar two peoples book tastes are, so if you are a person who likes a wide range or like fantasy but not romance fantasy, it’s not going be a perfect system for you. I have found people with 30% match to actually make more to my tastes than 100% people. I wish you could tag the books yourself to say what you liked most.