Life-hack app lives up to its name

By Adam Earnheardt

Type the words “Life Hacks” into your favorite app store search field and you’ll find dozens of apps.

I know this because I’ve downloaded and tested at least two dozen, and about a dozen or so are still on my smart phone.

Some life hack apps look familiar while others have a specific focus.

For example, there are life hack apps available for arts and crafts, foodies, money and investing, health, romance – even pool noodles.

Yes, pool noodles.

According to Wikipedia, a life hack is any trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty method that increases productivity and efficiency for the things we do every day.

With so many app store options, one company recently made the decision to change their app name in hopes of standing out in the ever-expanding life hack apps crowd.

It just so happens that life hack app is one of my all-time favorites: Crumblyy.

“There are multiple apps on the Google Play Store with the same name,” said Rahul Maurya, managing partner at TNine Infotech, the company behind Crumblyy. “We’ve been constantly enriching our application with more meaningful curated content and features which are mostly unique.”

“The name change was the need of the hour, to create a brand name of our own which could distinguish us from other similar apps in the life hacks category,” Maurya added.

The name Crumblyy comes from the app’s style of presenting content in short, crisp formats.

Think of their life hacks as small breadcrumbs of information, smart tips and tricks for tackling life’s everyday problems.

Crumblyy offers various categories for hacking life including technology, health and fitness, food and drinks, parenting, money savers, relationships, party hacks, survival, brainy (i.e., beating some of life’s tougher problems), and one of my favorites – daily life solutions – a kind of catch-all category.

For example, in the daily life solutions category, I found this hack:

Nothing kills weeds and keeps them dead longer like white vinegar straight from the bottle.

“With the release of this newer version, we introduced a notification feature and new hacks,” Maurya added.

Personal note: I like the notifications, but some users may not. Follow your device instructions for filtering or blocking unwanted notifications.

The user interface is sleek and simple to use, and boasts a small download size (4.6MB).

Crumblyy has more than 500,000 downloads and a 4.6 star Play Store rating (out of 5 stars).

According to Maurya, a major upgrade to the current version of Crumblyy is in a testing phase.

“We’ll add many new and exciting features into the app like up-voting a hack, reporting a hack, submitting a hack by a user, picture hacks, trending hacks, and many more,” Maurya added. “Our goal is to make Crumblyy a leader in the short content market in the next year.”

Adam Earnheardt is chair of the department of communication at Youngstown State University. Follow him on Twitter at @adamearn. Have a column idea? Email him at acearnheardt@gmail.com