Showbox lets you earn real rewards by trying out apps [Review]

Overview

There are apps for all kinds of things in the Play Store. Apps that let you play games. Apps that make you work more productively. Apps that help you better yourself. Apps that track your health and health goals. Apps for making life more convenient.

Now there’s an app that pays you to check out other apps, along with getting your friends to join in on the fun. It’s called Showbox, and it can turn you into a money-earning, app-trying machine.

Setup

Simple setup; Download from the Play Store. Create an account with either your email & password or the ol’ Facebook one-click method. Once done you are in.

Upon opening the app there is a full-window splash ad for a (supposedly sponsored) app to download; you can choose to download the app or close it and move to your home screen.

Usage

Using the app is really simple. You earn by two main efforts: downloading listed apps, recruiting your friends to join Shobox themselves.

For downloading apps, you earn $1 in monetary funds for every 1,400 points accrued. I’d say most of the apps offer 40-200 points per, but there are some that jump to 1,500, 2,500, or more. In any case, you have to quite a bit of downloading to acquire enough points to make a highly anticipated payout.  If you average 80 points per app download, you would have to download over 17 apps to earn $1.  That’s the math.

For friend recruitment, you earn points upfront (100 points for every friend who signs up), and you also get 50% of the points earned by each friend during their 1st month of use.

Your home screen lists all the apps you can accrue points by downloading. Most apps require only 15 minutes or so of usage to acquire your points, though some take up 24 hours. Once you’ve earned your points, you can keep the app (of course), or uninstall and move on to the next one.  If you’ve already downloaded the app in the past, though, you won’t be eligible to download on Showbox for points.

You earn by acquiring points, which can be redeemed several ways right in the app:

1. Monetary payout to your PayPal account.
2. Amazon gift cards.
3. Netflix gift cards.
4. Donating to charity.
5. Topping-up your current phone bill (for Singapore-based users only; the app developer is based in Sinagpore, so there you go).

You can also earn big chunks of points by winning periodic contests held by the app developers (mostly weekly point-races).  If your points don’t happen to show up after your app trial, you can submit a support ticket to the developer to rectify the situation.

Summary

Showbox is an app best suited for folks who already & regularly try out a bunch of apps on a consistent basis.  If this is you, then it only makes sense to do what you’re doing and perhaps acquire some assets while doing it.

For the rest of us, while it would seem to be a simple way to make a couple of extra bucks while wasting time on your phone or device, in the end I believe it would result in just that; a couple of dollars.

If you do truly have a penchant for acquiring new apps on a daily basis, then I’d say why not also download Showbox and earn some payback for your time?