OneDown - Crossword Puzzles 12+

This app is poorly conceived, poorly designed, and poorly executed.

1. The scrolling is sluggish. I’ve narrowed this down to an issue with the app and not my phone.

2. For some reason this uses a proprietary keyboard aesthetic vs the normal Apple one. It HAS to be Android derived.

3. When typing in a clue it has NO awareness of the clues around it. For instance if you have all of the across filled save a few boxes and those are all in the same down clue, when you start typing is just automatically starts in your across box and starts typing over your current correct answer.

4. When you start typing ALL OF THE CLUES ARE COVERED BY THE OBNOXIOUS KEYBOARD!

5. There is NO easy way to get from across to down. If I fill out 1 across I wanna look to see what 1 down is, but to do that you have to scroll ALL THE WAY through the across clues to get to the down ones.

6. You can’t even rotate the game to get more space!

This is just a clunky ill-conceived mess. I can credit the developer for their attempt, but can’t recommend this app. To anyone. I was going to give them the benefit of the doubt but it’s not been updated in over a year. They don’t care about it and it shows, and that’s unfortunate because with a lot of work this could be a decent crossword game.

Don’t waste your money. Even if it’s free it’s not worth the space.

Hi there, thanks for your review. I'm sorry it didn't meet your expectations, and I'm keen to try and rectify that.

1. I've not encountered an issue with the screen scrolling being sluggish. If you could send details about what device you're using to support@mnydigital.com, I'll try and look into it.
2. The keyboard is proprietary because it has to exclude certain keys from the normal keyboard that can't be entered into the grid. The aim is to make entering text easier, but it's a fine balance to strike and I appreciate that it's not necessarily perfect. I will try to improve it in the next release. To clarify, this is an iOS only app.
3. This is tricky because it's hard to fully know if you want to amend the across word or enter the down word in that case. You can double tap the box to move between across and down. I will continue to think about ways to improve the controls.
4. The priority is to keep the grid and "selected" clue at the top of the screen visible, especially on phones as the screen space there is limited. There are alternate ways to move between clues (swiping) and tapping/double tapping the grid. The keyboard can also be dismissed. I appreciate these may not be the answers you are looking for; ultimately something has to give to be able to show the keyboard when it is needed. If you have any ideas on how I can improve that please do get in touch.
5. As I said in the above point, you can simply double tap the current square to move between across and down. This is shown in the initial tutorial, but maybe it should be clearer.
6. Yes, that is a limitation, and it is something I would be keen to improve for iPad. As it stands, I've had to design it with portrait orientation being the focus as on iPhone it wouldn't work landscape. I've not had the resources to develop a dedicated horizontal layout but it is something on the list to look at when possible.

I hope that helps address some of your concerns, and while I appreciate they may not offer perfect solutions, rest assured I'm always open to improving the app and give it a great deal of care. I'm a sole developer who has supported the app with additional free content since it was originally released, and I am keen to support it further (an update is coming), but given that it doesn't pay any bills, I have to juggle several projects at once. I feel the price is fair given the amount of time it took me to write the crosswords alone (weeks), but I'm sorry if you disagree. Each purchase and feedback does help me to further develop the app. I would have been happy to help by email when you were having problems, and worked with you to improve things, but I appreciate you may have moved on by now. If you still would like to discuss anything related to it, I'm happy to. I hope in time you might consider revising your score slightly. Thanks.

I enjoyed solving the puzzles. For me, some words were hard but solvable if you put your mind to them. Some words were difficult, but not impossible. All crosswords makers have a style they use, I like the way this maker designed these.

Thank you very much for the review!