Late last year, I decided to find something I could do on my phone for those times when I was too tired to think or read, but wanted to do something while I was waiting for… an appointment, a train, a friend to show up. Something mindless.
I found I had been spending that time scrolling my feed on Substack, which I did not want to be doing. I had uninstalled the app previously but found I missed being able to read posts from people I had subscribed to while out or lying in bed, so I reinstalled it so I could do that.
However, I was now sometimes getting trapped on the feed. Which was part of the reason I had previously left other social media platforms. And I know it’s bad for me.
I needed something different.
When I’m at home, my colouring books fulfil that role. If I’m not sure what I want to do, I’ll grab whatever page I’m currently working on and colour until I decide to do something else. I’m fond of colouring while listening to an audiobook, or if I need a break from a screen.
So I decided to download a colouring app on my phone. I knew it wouldn’t be the same, and I wouldn’t enjoy it as much as that tactile experience of a paper colouring book, but I figured it would suffice as an alternative to a social media feed.
Ads
I downloaded a colouring app and watched an ad.
Wait.
What?
Before and after each colouring page, I needed to watch a short ad to support the app.
Makes sense. They need to make money somehow, right? I’d rather pay for something than have it be riddled with ads, though, so I went looking for the purchase option.
Which… I couldn’t find. Because it didn’t exist.
I scoured the app for any trace of a way to give them money to get rid of the ads.
None.
Scratching my head, I went to the app’s reviews and, between people praising various aspects of it, found people complaining about exactly this.
When it started playing ads multiple times in the middle of the same page, to the point I was ad watching more than colouring, I got annoyed.
I deleted it and downloaded a second app.
This one allowed me to pay for it. Great!
I quickly ran into another roadblock.
Hints
These apps are, by and large, of the colour by numbers variety. Each image has numbers between the lines, and each of those numbers corresponds to a particular colour. When a number is selected, it highlights the sections of the drawing you can fill in with the corresponding colour.
I kept running into areas I needed to colour which were so tiny, I couldn’t see them, even with the highlight. Luckily, this app had hints, so I could just press that whenever I couldn’t find what I needed.
Unluckily, the hints were limited in number.
And in order to get more,
You had
To watch
A fucking
Ad.
I began to believe1 they deliberately created these small, impossible-to-see sections to force you to use hints. And then once you’ve burned through them, you have to watch ads again.
What’s worse, if you didn’t find a new spot to colour quickly, or paused your movement of the picture to examine things more closely, that infuriating little light bulb would crop up to prompt you to watch an ad. I haven’t even had a chance to look at the whole picture yet! Bugger off!!
I deleted this app, too, and redoubled my search. I looked up best colouring apps for Android and got nothing that fit my criteria. As a last ditch effort, I started to go through the colouring app section on the Play Store.
Subscriptions
I found a number of apps that allowed me to pay to get rid of ads and bequeathed unlimited hints.
They had subscriptions!!
Just let me buy you outright!!!
The worst I saw made my stomach churn. $50/yr, marked down from $250/yr. This is absolutely a trap to catch people who forget to cancel, OR they make it ridiculously hard for you to cancel. Maybe even both!
Oh my god why is it so hard to have a normal colouring app on my phone.
Finally
My brute force searching paid off. I found an app that permitted a one-off payment of $20 that both eliminated ads and allowed me unlimited hints.
A number of its reviews were asking if the app’s owners had links to a previous app, Zen Color, which was similarly well-made, but had disappeared a while ago.
As a bonus, this app claims to have artists hand-drawing each piece, which I appreciate. I am always sceptical of any corporate claims, but at the very least, it looks good, it runs well, and I’m not watching ads every few minutes – or at all!
I’m quite happy with the app I’ve landed on. I’m concerned I’ll eventually run out of pages to colour in a few months’ time, but for now, I’m quite happy with my find.
- I still believe this. ↩︎
Musings From a Queer Environmentalist 
This is a very legitimate gripe and to my perception is endemic to basically every kind of app now. Apps which deliver a single function for an individual purchase are a rarity compared to a massive glut of “freemium” content. Bloat is also a substantial issue, with features completely unrelated to the intended usage someone would want, but crammed in to justify showing you more adds.
Quite recently I looked into getting a running app, something that followed a couch to 5K program. But the sheer *ocean* of terrible programs is difficult to sift through. “Free to start” “reduced rate subscriptions” “paid add reduction (not removal)” “one-time regular purchases (what?)” are just some of the shitty monetizations I’ve seen. Inane and offensive functionalities like “AI coach support.” I just want an app that gives me run/walk commands on a very gradual incrementing scale to improve my health!
Looking for human reviews of these apps and the strongest recommended option is created by the United Kingdom’s National Health Service. It’s not available to download *outside* the UK but I found multiple places where people strongly recommended using location spoofing to download it since it was so far and away the best choice. It’s good that *something* exists that will deliver what I want, but why does it have to be such a hassle in the first place?!
Especially for *this,* when I know for a fact better options were accessible and extant a decade ago! I used an app to do exactly this, and it was easy to find a free and fit for purpose one that delivered exactly what it said on the tin. But a general shift in the creation mindset has poisoned the well so thoroughly that now regardless of what you want to use, you’ll have to swim through waves of garbage to find an even halfway decent tool now.