Cry Translator may leave your wallet crying, do little else
Cry Translator is a relatively old application for iDevices that claims to analyze your infant’s wails and figure out what the sobbing lovable mess wants. It originally retailed for nearly $30, and has been steadily decreasing in price reaching today’s point of $4.99. It’s a most-wanted app for new parent tech geeks.
I thought this might be an interesting app to look into considering the references and reviews page had some pretty interesting websites including Wired, geek.com, and several high-profile news agencies listed as references.
My first hint that something was up was that the app has a one-star review for the current version across all submitted ratings, with the three displayed reviews being that it’s useless crap. My second was that their reviews and references page didn’t actually link to any of the articles they cited, just to screenshots of the logo and the start of the web page.
Cry Translator, and let loose the dogs of war
So I dug a bit more. The first of their references and reviews is a Wired article. Clicking the link takes you a screenshot from Wired, but no actual content. So I went to Wired and searched for the reference or review, and came up with this article from 2009, which is just an announcement that the product exists.
It appears to be the only time that Wired bothered reviewing this app, and the picture is the same, so I’ll assume that’s the one they were linking to.
Geek.com’s piece was similarly that “it exists.”
Daily Mail, NYDailynews, Fox8, ands news.com.au similarly were just product announcements, and not reviews of the product.
The Drs video piece they embed in their page is similarly just an “hey look at this app,” and not a review. They even seem rather dismissive of it when it finally does come up near the end.
The Cry Translator piece linked to ABC News also is skeptical that the thing even works.
Someone says Cry Translator actually works
Dr. Antonio Portugal Ramirez is the only person who claims it does work, unfortunately according to Barb’s Blog, he’s the founder of Cry Translator.
Meh!
Basically everything on the Cry Translator webpage seems to indicate that the product was launched, no proven independant results. The 1-star score on Itunes for the current version, comments such as “useless crap,” “even a broken clock is right twice a day,” etc tend to indicate it doesn’t work.
At one point reaching the top 40 downloads of apps worldwide, the thing retailed for around $30, and to this day it still brings in the money for frazzled parents of newborns looking for an app to solve their problems.
I’d suggest you read the actual ratings and reviews as the thing doesn’t look like it works, nor has it been updated in quite a while. I’m pretty sure this app is just counting on frazzled new parents’ inability to properly investigate as I can’t find anything positive about it.
And people will continue to buy it because they did an excellent job of making a website that looks like it’s got endorsements, and it looks like it’s got a doctor involved who wasn’t in on it.
You can currently throw $4.99 to them on iTunes to get their product. If it works for you, let me know, it would be nice if it wasn’t a scam.
[iTunes]
