Month: April 2017

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Bubble Chat

App Review – Bubble Chat

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Threat Level – High

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Bubble Chat is a free app designed by a company named Hit Labs. It appears this is Hit Labs first app for the Social Media genre and they went all in. 

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Group texting has slowly become popular with teens and adults. I see my daughters using apps such as GroupMe and iMessage group texting with their friends. My daughters cheer team and gymnastics team utilize the group feature of GroupMe. You also see circles of friends of your children getting involved in group messaging to stay connected. 

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So what is Bubble Chat? Bubble chat is a group texting app that has added a few extra features to make it stand out ahead of the competition. 

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When you first download the app, it asks you what kind of group you are wanting to start. Sporting group, friend group, etc. The app will then ask for your phone number to confirm you do have a number to associate it with. After these couple of steps to setup, you are ready to start your group. The app makes you select one person to add to the group before the group is created. Once your group is live, you can then add more people to it. The app uses data to send messages rather than using your texting plan through your cell phone. Most text driven apps use data, either cellular or wifi depending on what you are connected to. 

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If you use GroupMe or other messaging apps, the group text user interface will look similar. It has a chat window at bottom of screen along with buttons for sharing pictures, videos, gifs and stickers. You will also see a drop down menu at the top with the name of the group (or bubble) you are currently in. You can have multiple bubbles ..aka group chats.. going at one time. You will

notice in the lower menu there is a button for live video chat and also a menu of “celebrities” you can invite to your chat. I didn’t recognize any of the celebrities myself. They stated they were anything from professional models to MMa fighters. How often one of these so called celebrities will ever jump into someone’s chat is beyond me. Bubble Chat having this celebrity feature draws in curiosity from children. 

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The live video chat feature is something that the many other competing group texting app doesn’t have. You can select the live chat and immediately start sharing live video with up to 10 people in your group. This is a good feature for the app, but unsupervised children and live video chat do not mix well. Adults or monitored chat for your children would be preferred for this feature. Add the “celebrity” chat and now you could have your children inviting strangers or so called celebrities to their chat groups. or live video streams. 

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Other members of your groups or “bubbles” must have the app installed on their devices as well. The live chat feature along with inviting “celebrities” to your bubbles, is what bumped this group texting app up to a high threat level. 

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Make sure if you let your kids use Bubble chat, you stay on top of who they are in chats with and especially who they are live chatting with in the video streams. 

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Clips

App Review – Clips

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Threat Level – Very Low

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The app Clips is Apples newest app available on the App Store. Clips app basically is named after the word Video Clips because that is literally all you do with it. Edit videos. 

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In the world of Snapchat, FB messenger and other social media outlets where pictures and videos are being shared, I feel Apple needed to be involved without taking on the social media side to those apps. So out of no where the Clips app launched. I was kind of confused at first because Apple already has an app called iMovie that allows just about any editing option for pictures and video that can be offered but then I understood what they were going for which I’ll explain shortly. 

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The Clips app was the first app I have seen that requires you to be on the newest version of IOS 10.3.1. When I went to download the app, a prompt immediately popped up that did not allow me to download the app without updating to newest IOS. Let’s be honest with ourselves for a minute. How many times do you click the later button as your phone asks you to update, even though they’re security updates. So the skinny on this newest Apple app is if you want Clips, you must update. Once the update is installed and you are ready to launch Clips, you will see a pretty basic, simple to use interface attached to a video editing app. Clips allows you to take videos or select videos to throw some editing towards. Add captions? Sure .. Add stickers? sure. Would you like to use live dictation to put text over top of your videos? You can do that too. 

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So now to the rating and should you let your children use Clips app. I have it a very low threat level because that is my lowest rating. This app doesn’t have any features that is going to jeopardize safety or security of device and is really easy to use. This app allows only local editing and the share features have to be shared in other apps. So basically this app is just an editing app for your videos and once your done you can save away to your device to pull up in other apps. The export video after edit is your normal selections, device, camera iCloud Drive etc. In a long list of picture editing apps, this is Apples answer to video editing with no new social media ties. 

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