Horoscope Review: Stinky App for Android: Why You Won't Want to Share Forecasts from "Horoscope Plus"

Each day Astrology.com generates 20 different horoscopes: Daily Extended, Daily Singles, Daily Couples, Daily Flirt, Daily Teen, and Daily Dog, to name some--and syndicates some or all of these scopes to online venues such as Yahoo.com and many mobile apps. Mark Lerner writes its daily, accurate Cosmic Calendar, and some highly regarded astrologers contribute articles (but not horoscopes) to Astrology.com. This big business also feeds Horoscope Plus for Android, downloaded more than 100,000 times and, at last count, given five stars by 10,000 of the 11,000 users who rated it.

Then how has Horoscope Plus inspired recent user comments such as "It's just bad...the dates are all mixed up...gives valentines advice in december???" or "Not a lot to love here"?

This free app's engineering and design will confuse first-timers. Horoscope Plus defaults to Aries, pictured as a ram outlined so it resembles a trashy rhinestone T-shirt. Slide through a shadowy toolbar to "Select Your Sign"'s symbol or rhinestone picture (Virgos will hardly recognize themselves). The picture is labeled with the sign's name, birth dates, and a few adjectives describing classic Sun-sign traits. But you can't set your Sun sign as default, and -- now that you're there -- where the heck is the horoscope? The page offers no buttons to tap, and hitting the hardware's "menu" button is ineffective. Through trial and error, a big waste of time, I learned to tap on the center of the rhinestone picture for my daily forecast. The daily summary is in turquoise type and the forecast is white on a dark violet background. It's still readable.

Of course content is what really counts, and after following daily content at Horoscope Plus I find it ranges from spot-on to senseless. November 29 said, "Skip the movies today and go for something more educational and interactive." Not bad advice. December 13 said, "Things have loosened up at work." It was true! Then on December 26 my forecast began, "How can you work to become a more spiritually aware person? Now, that doesn't mean you have to sit on a cushion for twelve hours a day chanting 'Ommm'." A "Share" button appears beneath every forecast -- "Share" is this app's big innovation -- but this was obviously filler and not worth sharing. Accuracy improved when I located the weekly horoscopes by clicking the "Period" button. But mostly it had only random relevance and throwaway advice. Leo (week of December 26) was told: "On Sunday, make a fort with your couch cushions, crawl in with a magazine or some headphones, and don't come out for anyone." That could be harmful advice if certain people such as parents took it seriously.

The "Period" button accesses the weekly, monthly and yearly horoscopes. "Yearly" for my sign seemed spot-on. Try it. But users exploring this app will tire of using their hardware's "back" button to get out of it, more so than on any other horoscope app I've tried. This app is said to be "best designed for Android phones." According to comscore.com, as of Nov. 2011 Android is the most-used and fastest-growing smartphone platform with 46 percent of the market share. Android apps are proliferating and competition is fierce. Developers should know that users might download turkey apps but that doesn't mean they are using them.

The mysterious button "Affinity" is for compatibility readings. By the time you click "Affinity" you've selected your sign, so now you select a friend's and read the compatibility report. These are the best reports in this app and they are the only reason not to uninstall.

The daily and weekly content grew so vague and bizarre I finally Googled some phrases and found that, for example, Aries' January 1, 2012 forecast was previously used on May 19, 2010. Planetary aspects can and will recur, but no two days or weeks are ever alike, and this careless, random "recycling" is what makes Valentine's forecasts come up in December, as a user complained. If Horoscope Plus or any other app or feeder site thinks users won't catch on to this, or that it's not a deal-breaker, they are wrong.

Sylvia Sky, experienced astrologer, reviews online horoscopes and horoscope apps and psychic sites for quality and accuracy. Read about an app that is more fun. Copyright 2012 by Sylvia Sky.