This App Can Measure Happiness Hit or miss, let's find out.

Pebble's smart watches have raised the final red flag stating we're over crowded by apps – by launching an app that tells you when you were happy. In the literal definition of gluttony, the app almost does nothing at all that is even remotely interesting to measure happiness quotient, because well, science doesn't really know how to measure it either (yet). By consistently pestering the user to enter their values of 'happiness', the app would collect your inputs and give a neat summary at the end of the week. Exactly what this app would achieve is unknown.

Interface

The interface is clean, but not simplified as Apple's default Health app is. The graph is refreshing, but there's an excessive use of color that's just annoying to look at. The ability to control what notifications would relay back on your app is convenient, and if you have the watch (mandatory for it to work), you'd find this update disappointing.

Utility

Ask yourself seriously, why would you need an app update that asks you to tell it on a scale of zero to five how happy you are? Would you download the feeling of achievement by raising their download counts and thus, encouraging other developers to create such bloat ware, or would you rather use a pen and paper and write down when you're sad (or use your smartphone's in-built notepad)? Do you forget when you were happy in the week or sad and what caused it?

Overall verdict

There would have been infinite possibilities to measure a user's happiness quotient – for example using
the camera and the flash to record one's heartbeat, then sharing that data along with pupil dilation using scanners from the front camera, activity prior to measure using motion sensors and mix it up with the users pre-entered eight and body profile. Of course, even such a measurement wouldn't be accurate, but it could have made a pretty amusing measurement or a close estimate to being "happy". Instead, they have wasted the market by just being a journal type and not a measurement app. I do not see any reason for anyone to download the app, except Pebble smartwatch users, who can also wait for a newer update instead.

(Originally published in BIZ Experiences India magazine's July 2016 edition)