Fake-AutoStitch screenshot
AutoStitch (now called Stitch Pictures)
Version reviewed: 1.0
Price: $0.99
Bottom Line: A horrible, slow, buggy app deceptively named after the real excellent pano app. Purchase at your own risk.
UPDATE: This app has gone through its second name change. It’s now called Stitch Pictures. Little else has been done to address the other problems of this app. It’s still a horrible app.
When buying photo apps, few things hack me off worse than a buggy, crappy photo app that’s confusingly named to fool unsuspecting buyers into thinking they purchased the real app, which is often a top-seller, or current owners into repurchasing the app thinking it’s an update.
New panorama app AutoStitch by toni peter is not the AutoStitch you are looking for. You want the far superior AutoStitch Panorama by Cloudburst Research. If you buy AutoStitch, you do so at your own risk and you will be disappointed.
Let me repeat this. AutoStitch by toni peter is not the AutoStitch you are looking for. If you’re looking for the good pano app, that’s AutoStitch Panorama and you can get it right here.
The fake AutoStitch is designed from the ground up to confuse and deceive buyers into accidentally purchasing this hugely inferior app. It takes advantage of the real app’s success, quality, and word-of-mouth.
If you search for “AutoStitch” in the app store — which is what AutoStitch Panorama is often called — fake AutoStitch currently shows up at the top of the search results in the number one spot. The logos are confusingly similar. Both are blue and have mountain peaks on them. The splash screen and screen captures are even visually similar, but different enough to avoid copyright violation.
The app itself is buggy, slow and horrible. Unlike the real AutoStitch Panorama where the import process is grouped and is fast, smooth and easy, In the fake app, images are imported one at time and because of animations and the overall lack of speed of the app, this is done very slowly. It took me as long to import five images as it took the real AutoStitch to import, process, crop and save the same images.
A five panel pano took over five minutes just to process. I had to tap my screen to keep my iPhone awake several times during the processing. The app repeatedly choked at about 80% processing. I was afraid to test this app one one of the large 10-20 image panos I regularly create with the real AutoStitch. It would probably seriously drain my battery for one image. Going from import screen to save image took over 8:30 with fake AutoStitch. The same five panels took less than 2:15 with the real AutoStitch Panorama, beginning to end.
The crop function in the fake AutoStitch looked promising. It has nice, big handles to easily adjust the corners of the crop. However, the crop tool needs a lot of work. It’s frustratingly unresponsive. There was nothing I could do to fine tune the crop area, except save and crop in another app.
After all that processing time, I at least expected a good-quality pano. Image resolution of the ripoff AutoStitch is horrible. The real AutoStitch saved a 9 MP version of the file, rich in clarity and detail. The fake version only saved a 2.6 megapixel version at its highest setting. All of the finer detail had been rezzed out. The stitching of the pano itself wasn’t bad, but when an app throws away as many pixels as this one does, it’s probably a lot easier to match up pixels. Doing an apples-to-apples quality comparison of the two panos is impossible because of this.
The fake AutoStitch seems to me to be a confusing, poorly coded pano app, deceptively named to steal search engine results and sales from the far superior AutoStitch Panorama. This is even worse than just releasing a lousy, buggy app. Again, please buy the real “AutoStitch.” You will be be hugely disappointed with this fake one.
Hello, Photo App Hall of Shame….
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It may be just a buck, but you also may spare someone the feeling of getting ripped off.
Fake AutotStitch is $0.99. Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.Requires iOS 3.1.3 or later
I’m not including a link to this ripoff version. Here’s a link to the real version of AutoStitch Panorama.
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Fake AutoStitch full size image. (Option-click or right -click to download full res, 1 MB)
AutoStitch Panorama full size image. (Option-click or right -click to download full res, 3.4 MB)
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