Chartreuse

The app store icon on my iPhone is consistently sending me notifications and making annoying dinging noises to alert me on app updates. Even during the 60 seconds it took me to type that sentence, my cellular device sent me two notifications about renovations on my apps. Anyway, this got me to thinking about how ridiculous the app industry has gotten nowadays- there’s seriously an app for everything. Granted, some apps are really useful. For example, I probably wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if it wasn’t for the “soothing beach wave” setting on my snooze app. And in the mornings, my weather app is extremely useful for planning the day’s outfit, and helping me decide between rain boots or winter boots. 

But then there are the completely pointless apps that are created for the sole purpose of taking up gigabyte space on our apple devices. For example, I used to have this app that would allow you to bake, frost, and decorate virtual cupcakes. It was completely worthless, and the cyber cupcakes would seriously take a whole five minutes just to bake. So here I am, sitting at home watching the little oven on my iPhone screen bake my fucking cupcakes that AREN’T EVEN REAL.

The sad part is, I would get so damn excited when my imaginary cupcakes were done. But then the fake cupcakes would have to be put on the fake cooling rack so that they could fake cool off before they were fake frosted. And that would take another 3 minutes. And the cooling timer would just tick… and tick… and tick. And I would just sit there and watch it count down like some deranged hypnotized four month old playing peek-a-boo.  

Finally, after the cupcakes baked and cooled, you could frost them. But here’s the catch- they only provide you with five frosting colors in the free app version that I had. So if you wanted your cupcakes to be frosted in, say chartreuse, you would have to pay $0.99 and upgrade to the “elite” version. The most depressing thing is that I seriously considered dishing out the money to get twenty more frosting colors. I almost paid money- real, hard, cash- to buy computer-generated frosting colors for my fucking virtual cupcakes that NOBODY EVEN SEES.

Unless of course, you press the button that allows you to share a picture of your virtual cupcake via twitter or Facebook. But nobody actually presses that button, because it shows the rest of the world that your life is so sad that you bake virtual cupcakes in your free time. And that you can’t even frost them the way you want to.  Really, this is just the app industry’s way of ripping us all off and making us pay for things (such as cyber frosting) we don’t even really want to buy. Not even if it is chartreuse colored and makes our pretend cupcakes look delicious.

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