I've been involved...

...in quite a quibble with Versus TV about the quality of its $15 iPhone Tour de France app.

The app is breathtakingly lousy, even for free.

But they're charging $15 (non-refundable, of course, at the Apple App Store) and at that price it's consumer fraud at the least.

A few examples follow:

1) at "Reports -> Photos" for example there is a screen of thumbnails of photos that probably are of the TDF, but they're unidentified and have no captions. Even more incredible is that the individual photos are static: you can't swipe left or right to go to the next photo. You have to go back out to the thumbnails, remember where you were, and select the next photo that way. But there's no captions or context or anything: they're just random photos

2) at "Reports -> Twitter" the tweets are all static text, so that hashtags or URLs in the tweet are completely useless. Even more astonishing is the fact that the text of the tweets is completely static also: you can't even Select -> Copy -> Paste anything, so again the hashtags and URLs are worthless

3) at "Tracking -> Map" or "Tracking -> Profile" the current position of the peleton in the day's stage is in real time, whereas Versus TV's "live" (I get up at 5:30 am PDT to watch it) broadcast is wildly time-shifted to fit in endless ads and personal-interest puff-pieces such that the "live" Versus broadcast never matches up with the location of the peleton as its shown on Versus' $15 iPhone app

So I guess this "feature" is for people who are at work not working but trying to follow the TDF...

4) the "Tracking -> Map" or "Tracking -> Profile" displays a white-screen-of-death and locks up if you rotate the iPhone over to landscape mode

5) at "Standings -> Stage results" (or any other subsection of Standings) the data apparently has to re-load itself off Versus' servers each time you access a specific screen - and half the time no data ever loads

6) and then there's just the garden-variety random crashes, where the app suddenly collapses under its own weight and drops me out to a random home screen.

Even *that* happens all-too-frequently for a beta app, let alone an app that's gone through Apple's allegedly-rigorous Apple Store iPhone App Approval Process(tm), let alone an App Store app that's free, let alone an App Store app that costs $15 (that's "fifteen") (did I say non-refundable?) dollars...

Finally, today (Tuesday July 6) shortly after the end of Stage 3, the cake was taken by the fact that suddenly "Tracking -> Map" or "Tracking -> Profile" was showing the peleton well out on Stage 4:

What's wrong with this picture, you might well ask.

Well, Stage 4 doesn't even start until tomorrow, Wednesday July 7.

I wonder if Versus TV's going to bill me for another $15 now that they've added time travel to their #fail crappy iPhone app...

p.s. in all this time I've never received any response whatsoever from @VersusTV on Twitter or on their Facebook page, this despite having made dozens of tweets about their POS...