Ninety seconds, 10 crashes. That was my first introduction to Matchbook, a location bookmarking app for iPhone and iPod Touch. Clearly, that’s not a great foot to start off upon and my experience didn’t get any better. In fact, Matchbook’s instability is so overwhelming the app is unusable.
Should Matchbook get its act together, its premise is promising. In it, users bookmark places they want to go, such as bars, stores or restaurants. It’s an ideal app for city dwellers, like me, who often pass by an intriguing storefront and then promptly forget it ever existed. If Matchbook worked, I could use the app to save the name and address of the location for later reference. I could, in theory, add tags and notes and see all of my saved bookmarks on a map. I could also browse other people’s tags to see places they thought were worth remembering. But, since Matchbook doesn’t work I can’t do any of that. To be clear, I was only in the app long enough to see what its screens look like. I was unable to actually do anything in the app at all.
Another of Matchbook’s promising features is that you can shake the device to see nearby bookmarks. Cool, but the only shaking I did was in rage over this app’s bugs. Matchbook also says that it has added deal notifications, so you can see if there’s a Groupon, Gilt City or LivingSocial for any place you’ve bookmarked. This feature is a huge incentive to visit somewhere new and will be Matchbook’s key to retaining an active user base, once, you know, the app is functional.
