Countdown ‪‎‬ 4+

I’ve had this app for years. The ability to change fonts, add photos and name the event is fantastic. However, even with a paid subscription there are junk pop-up ads like ‘virus detected’.
The home screen widget has a countdown but doesn’t show a picture and instead of saying ‘holiday’ or whatever you’ve named your event, it says ‘oops’. It was funny at first but now it’s just annoying having a grey box on my screen that says 135 days until oops

This is a 10 minute review: “how did I find the first 10 minutes of using this app?”...

For an app that’s supposed to be an extension of your calendar/excitement building app... it falls short with being awkward and _not fun_ to look at or use.

It takes ages to set up a single event (loading photos, fonts, colours) and when finished... the app font might not work with the default Apple widget aesthetic.

Pros:
- Calendar event link (note, you cannot change the title of an event in the app so if you have connecting flights to a place, you’d be better off doing it manually).
- Lots of choice with fonts which is nice to go with photos
- Landscape mode
- No “categorizing” which you see in other apps (this is a personal thing. Events for me don’t need to be categorized in an app like this, I would do that in my own calendar)

Cons:
- Excessive ad placement: There’s an ad in the widget and another ad every time you press a button.
- Too much choice for most of it: Slows down the process of creating events and the font I chose to go with my photo ended up looking silly in the widget (above the ad which was a different font too).
- Default photos cannot be removed: even though free doesn’t include a slideshow, I accidentally swiped up once and a different (default) photo appeared which was completely separate to my event. Weird.

Opened the app after a recent update (I only use this app to countdown to holidays) and it came up with a pop up to say that location services have been turned on to find countdowns near me, and that I can turn off location in the app settings.

I don’t want to know about countdowns near name so I went to settings to turn it off and the blurb about the location services said that it’s for advertisement purposes (so already two conflicting pieces of information, but I’m believing the latter). I turn it off, and go back, it turns it back on again with the pop up, and I do this three more times.

You cannot use this app without sharing your location with them. Which is absolutely ridiculous. For the one task this app does, I can do myself- I now have deleted it. I am sick of things needing to know my location to give me ads.