Price: $0.99 Score: 5/10 Category: Lifestyle
Icon Skins Pro is a homescreen and icon wallpaper package designed to create the illusion that your app screen icons have been specially surrounded with everything from growing grass to flowery designs or flames and force field electrical currents. There are literally hundreds of designs to choose from, but unfortunately this is an app that just doesn’t work very well.
It’s not that the art itself is poor or that it’s difficult to find a nice design amongst the hundreds of choices for icon skins, icon shelves, and wallpapers. If I had to make a stereotypical call I would say that most of the art probably leans toward appealing to the young male metal listener, but with the huge selection there’s something in here for just about anyone.
There are designs fit for vampire lovers, wintertime, goofy MS Word help screen Paperclip lovers, hackers, and minimalists. At first Icon Skins Pro seems like it could be a good deal, but then it starts crashing and constantly warning you that your device has limited memory (this happened on both my iPad and iPhone even though both have plenty of available memory).
Barring the annoying warnings and crashes, Icon Skins Pro is fairly straightforward. When you first open icon skins you’re presented with a quick menu screen that lets you browse icon skins, icon shelves, locks screens, and favorites. There’s also an instructions button that explains the process of saving a skin to your iPhone.
Once you’ve found a skin or wallpaper that suits you, you save it to your Photo Library. Then you go to your images to retrieve it, press use as home screen, and supposedly your iDevice is transformed. Unfortunately for Icon Skins Pro and anyone who has purchased it, the skins only line up correctly about 30 percent of the time.
In some cases all it takes is a little tinkering to make the homescreen decorations passable, but in other instances the backgrounds and snazzy designs are almost impossible to finagle. One of the few designs that actually works well from the start is the iBooks wooden shelves default screen.
If you’re willing to pay $0.99 for some lock screen wallpapers and the default iBooks skin (or ready to work to make other designs fit) maybe the app is worth while. Don’t expect it to work on the iPad though, as the 2x magnification pixelates the images beyond repair. AppCore had a good idea with Icon Skins Pro, all it needs now is to work better.
Bottom Line: Icon Skins Pro is a less than ideal wallpaper and icon wrapper design app with the right idea but poor execution. Until an update fixes something, expect this one to work about half the time.
