Lucktastic is another, but one of the bigger, rewards app that lets you essentially exchange your time for money. Instead of doing surveys, or watching advertisement after advertisement (even though there are still plenty of ads), you scratch off virtual tickets every day to try and get rewards. The potential rewards vary from card to card, but each card will either net you some real cash, or some of the app’s virtual currency you can use to redeem gift cards when you have enough. If you’ve used a survey app before, you know the deal with these by now. Most of these are legitimate, not scams, but they always take a lot of time. Before you spend a waste a week of your free time on an app that might amount to nothing, let me tell you about Lucktastic in this review. I’ve used plenty of apps like this before, so I know a good one, or a bad one, when I see it.
Getting Started with Lucktastic
The quickest way to turn me off of one of these apps is to have a drawn out, and requirement heavy signup process. Thankfully, with Lucktastic that isn’t the case. To start with all you need is your zip code, and have to be within the US.
After that, you can start playing right away to see if you like the app. The app will save any coins and cash you have even if you’re unregistered as long as you keep a hold of the app, but you can’t redeem any rewards until you register. To register, all you need is an email address, your name, or you can use your Facebook if you just want to bypass all of that together.
Personally, I recommend you just register normally and don’t use the Facebook option. It may be faster, but it opens up your information to more eyes than it should, and potentially puts your privacy and account at risk. After you followup with the email you’re sent, you’re good to go with Lucktastic. It’s an extremely easy app to get into, and one that might be hard to leave because of it’s addictive nature.
Lucktastic’s App Design and Weight
The app icon for Lucktastic looks better than the entire rest of the app by far. That might sound a little harsh, but the overall design is very basic for the enticing theme Lucktastic has going for it. The app is all about trying to win it big, but instead the interface looks low budget, aside from the dropdown menu on the left side.
Putting design aside, what do I mean by weight? I’m not calling Lucktastic fat, even though I think some of the buttons are a little chubby, but I’m talking about how many resources it eats. Something I noticed early on with my usage of the app is that it takes quite a long time to unlock my phone with the app open. I’m using a phone without a lot of RAM to spare, so I decided to see how much space Lucktastic needed to operate, and I was unfortunately surprised with what I saw.
Lucktastic is a complete RAM hog, so if you have even less RAM to work with than I do, expect crash after crash if you’re running more than this app in the background. So what exactly is Lucktastic doing that needs all that RAM? I’ll cover its permission system later so you can see some of the things I’m talking about.
How do You Earn Money With Lucktastic?
Lucktastic has two different currencies: hard cash, and tokens. Cash can be redeemed instantly if you have a dollar or more through three different methods, with more coming soon. Tokens are used to enter sweepstakes, and earn digital gift cards if you have a large amount of them.
So how do you get either currency? If you want either cash or tokens, luck is the name of the game, and the name of the app now that I think about it. Every day you’re given a certain number of themed scratch off tickets that you play for cash or tokens, but every ticket has a guaranteed token amount to win.
If you think that sounds generous, it really isn’t when the bonus amount of tokens you get is as small as two measly tokens, when any item worth redeeming is worth several thousand. It’s better than nothing, but to me it comes off as nothing but a way to keep you playing with the app.
Whether or not continued play is a bad thing will have to wait until a later section of the review. Most of the scratch off tickets don’t cost anything to play, but some have extra requirements. Some tickets want you to share them on facebook, others want you to subscribe to them on YouTube, and etc. before you can scratch them. Even when you do fulfill these requirements there’s still no guarantee you’ll win anything, so be careful with giving away too much of your personal information.
At the start of practically every ticket is a video, or a picture ad generally lasting anywhere from fifteen seconds to thirty. Once the ad is done, and you close it, you can scratch your ticket, and if you’re lucky, claim some winnings. At the same time, through either ads, or another page in the app, you can install other selected apps to get a token bonus that’s usually much higher than anything you’ll earn on a ticket.
I can’t vouch for all of the apps on Lucktastic’s list since I can’t review all of them, but be wary when downloading other apps on your Android just to get extra tokens. Only download apps and games you think you can trust.
Aside from following through on offers, at the same time you can watch trailers, and take surveys to increase your token count.
If you don’t plan on investing much time into Lucktastic every day, it’s easy to ignore these and just focus on the daily and nightly tickets you can scratch off. It takes me around 15-20 minutes to clear out all of my tickets in a day, and my best day so far has been 100+ tokens, and a dollar in cash. For about fifteen minutes of poking my screen, that isn’t too bad, and that’s even without doing all of the extra tickets with more requirements. If you’re luckier than I was, you might do even better.This all sounds pretty simple, so there must be something else going on behind the scenes, right?
What’s the “Catch” to Lucktastic?
No one would ever give you money just for scratching off virtual tickets, so there’s a catch here right? I’m not just talking about the adverts that play before every ticket either. If you’re giving your information away to unlock extra tickets, that’s the other price you’re paying for a chance at the big bucks.
At the same time, because the token costs for prizes are so high, you’re more likely to quit the app before you actually get a payout. You can cash out with dollars for as low as $1, but for tokens, the prizes go into the thousands, so it’ll take at least a month or two before you can earn anything with them. On the other hand, sweepstakes and other “games” are constantly offered for you to spend your tokens on, getting you further and further away from your goals.
If you don’t end up redeeming everything, all you end up doing is giving Lucktastic your personal information, some free advertising, and more money by watching their ads, or installing their partnered games and apps. If that isn’t enough to get you to raise an eyebrow, take a look at all the permissions the app wants enabled.
All of these can be innocent, but they aren’t exactly something I want a company having access to at all times. If you’re wondering why your phone is so slow when Lucktastic is open, this laundry list of permissions just might be why. Lucktastic isn’t employing a shady strategy to keep you far away from redeeming your tokens, but it isn’t an easy one to resist, especially with the game’s addictive nature.
Why is Lucktastic Addictive?
What Lucktastic does differently than all those other survey type apps on the Play Store and elsewhere is how they work in a luck element. Every day you’re playing different, but essentially the same, games of chance with small but variable payoffs.
It’s very unlikely that you’ll win big, but each small win gives you enough motivation to keep playing until you finally give up and move on to something else, or manage to hit a big payoff. Lucktastic sends you about four push notifications a day if you still have them turned on, with each one telling you about how much money you could win if you log back in.
However, even though Lucktastic can be addictive, is it harmful? You aren’t exactly gambling with Lucktastic, but you are betting time in hopes of some big payoff. There’s no way to put money into Lucktastic either to buy tokens, so the only currency you’re spending is time to try and get cash and tokens. Anything with an addictive quality is harmful if you start to obsess over it, but as long as you don’t spend too much time every day on the app, I think it’s fine to use.
How Stable is Lucktastic, is it Safe?
The only time I have a problem with the Lucktastic app is when it’s trying to load an ad, which sometimes makes it crash. If you crash when you’re about to try your hand at a ticket, don’t worry, you’ll still be able to scratch it off when you log back in. The Lucktastic app itself seems safe to use, but I can’t say anything about all the other apps it wants you to download to get more tokens. Exercise caution when taking a look at any of these offers, and don’t do anything that puts you or your Android at risk.
I’m still a little wary about all of the permissions the app wants, but I haven’t run into any problems with them besides annoying push notifications.
Can You Make a Fortune With Lucktastic?
Lucktastic seems fair to a point, but it isn’t overly generous with its currency, or cash. You might get lucky and strike it rich, but with digital tickets it’s always tough to tell if you’ll ever get the winning symbols you need until the system decides you will.
I don’t know anyone personally who has made a large sum of money with Lucktastic, but I think if you play a bit of it every day for a few minutes, you’ll eventually end up with a good chunk of change. With Lucktastic, and other apps like it, it’s nearly impossible to make a fortune, or even a decent living on them. However, if you cycle different apps you can make a supplemental income that’s much better than nothing if you aren’t doing anything with your Android.
Conclusion
After spending some time with Lucktastic, and other apps that try and do the same thing, I think Lucktastic isn’t a bad one to add to the cycle. If you constantly use the app throughout a month or two, you’ll eventually end up with enough money to justify your time spent. I think Lucktastic is best used alongside other similar apps, like survey apps, or even other kinds of apps to help you and your Android pick up some extra cash. The only problem with using it in conjunction with other apps is that Lucktastic is a RAM hog, and doesn’t play nice with anything else on your phone. It has high profit potential, but unless luck is on your side, your earnings will be relatively low. Since I’ve always been a fan of games of chance, even if the odds are stacked against me, I think Lucktastic is worth a try. If you’re curious about it, use it for a week or two before deciding if it’s worth it for you. Have any apps like Lucktastic you want to tell us about, or have experiences to share? Please tell us in the comments below! Featured Image Credit
