Comparing brain games: what to look for before you pay

Search for brain games and the first page is full of apps with a daily workout, a score and a graph that goes up. Most of them cost money after a free week. We sell a brain game product ourselves, so a comparison written by us has a built-in problem. Our way around it is a section further down, under the heading where Skillido loses to the rest, with five points on which another provider is the better buy. The four checks before that heading work on any app in this category, including ours.

Does the subscription keep renewing on its own?

Almost every large brain training app sells a subscription, monthly or yearly, that renews until you cancel it. The first charge is small and the rest sits in the future. Five dollars a month is sixty a year and three hundred over five years. Before you pay, find the renewal period and the price after the trial, and put the renewal date in your calendar.

Then find out where you cancel. A subscription bought inside an app on an iPhone is canceled in the App Store settings, and one bought on Android in Google Play, in both cases at the store rather than at the company. The help pages of Apple and Google say the same thing: deleting the app does not cancel the subscription. That is where people go wrong. They remove the app and the charge goes on.

Does it measure something, or is it a pastime?

Both are fine, as long as you know which one you are buying. A crossword app or a puzzle site promises a pleasant half hour and delivers that. Once scores, progress bars and weekly graphs appear, something else is being suggested, namely that the number means something beyond the game itself.

One question settles it, and that is what your score is compared with. There are only three possible answers. A scale the maker drew up, the actual distribution of all players, or the distribution within a group you belong to, such as your age group. Only the last two are a measurement. A maker who cannot or will not answer that question is selling a pastime with a scoreboard.

Be especially wary of percentiles. A line such as better than 80 percent of players needs a group of players large enough to split into comparable groups. When an app that launched last month shows that line, the number was made up.

What happens to your data?

For an app you can check this without installing it. Every listing in Apple's App Store has an App Privacy section, and every listing in Google Play has a Data safety section, in which the maker itself declares what it collects, whether that data is linked to you and whether it is shared with other companies. If purchase history, location and identifiers are listed under data used to track you, the app is partly paid for with your data, and that is also why the free tier can exist.

Our own side, since we just asked it of others. The free Brain Check stores your game results under a random session number, without a name or email address, and we ask for an email address only when you buy the report. We also record on our own server which steps a session took, even if you reject cookies. If you arrive from an ad and accept marketing cookies, a cookie keeps for thirty days where you came from. Analytics and marketing scripts load only after you accept them. All of that, with retention periods, is in our privacy policy.

Where the score comes from

This is where the industry has a record. In January 2016 the US Federal Trade Commission announced that Lumos Labs, the company behind Lumosity, would pay 2 million dollars to settle charges that its advertising made claims the company did not have the evidence for. In October 2014 the Stanford Center on Longevity and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development had already published a statement, signed by a group of researchers, that called the claims in brain game advertising frequently exaggerated and at times misleading. And in 2016 Simons and colleagues went through the studies the companies themselves cited, in a review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, and found that practicing a game makes you better at that game, with much less evidence that the gain carries over to other tasks.

So look at two things. First, whether a maker cites research about its own product or about the subject in general; advertising copy blurs that difference as a matter of routine. Second, how the scale was built: who the players were that the scale was set on, and whether that is written down somewhere you can read it.

Where Skillido loses to the rest

This is the heading this article exists for. Five points on which we are not the best choice, in the order in which we think they matter.

1. Content per euro. What we sell in English is a report of €9.95, paid once, about the five free games: a percentile per game, your strongest and your lowest game, a comparison with your earlier Brain Checks and a thirty-day practice schedule as text. No new games come with it. An app with a free tier gives you dozens of games for nothing. If you select on quantity, buy there.
2. Free is a real option. The free tier of Lumosity, Peak or Elevate costs nothing, and a newspaper puzzle page costs nothing at all. If your question is how to pass half an hour pleasantly, every euro spent here is one too many.
3. We are new. Skillido has few players, so you will find no reviews, no experiences of others and no track record. The large apps have been in the stores for years.
4. No comparison with other players yet. Our scale is our own assumption. Providers with many players can set you against others; we can do that only once 50 people have completed the Brain Check.
5. No app and no offline play. You play in the browser. There is nothing in the App Store or Google Play, and without internet nothing works. A paper puzzle book beats all of us on that point.

What the Skillido Brain Check is, and what it costs

The free Brain Check is five games of 45 seconds each. Every game gives a game score from 0 to 100, and the average of the five is your Brain Check score. We set the scale for each game ourselves, so that 50 is an ordinary round. That is our own calibration, the first of the three answers above, and we say so. From 50 completed Brain Checks onward a percentile appears next to your score, set against the other players on this site, and within your age group once that group is large enough. The test is free, needs no account and shows all five scores right away.

The full report costs €9.95 once, with no subscription, and we sell it in Ireland, Malta and the Netherlands for now, in euros, by credit card, PayPal or iDEAL. You have the legal fourteen days to withdraw and, on top of that, our own guarantee of fourteen days money back without a reason. The details are on the pricing page.

Frequently asked questions

Are brain training apps worth the money?

That depends on what you want from them. For a pleasant pastime, a free tier or a puzzle book does the job. For a measurement, ask what the score is compared with, and pay only when the answer is a group of real players.

How do I cancel a brain training subscription?

At the store where you bought it, so in your Apple account settings on an iPhone and in Google Play on Android. Deleting the app does not cancel anything.

Is the Skillido Brain Check a brain training app?

No. It is a free test of five games in the browser, with a paid report of €9.95 for those who want more detail. There is no app and no subscription.

Sources

• Federal Trade Commission, 5 January 2016, Lumosity to pay 2 million dollars to settle deceptive advertising charges: ftc.gov
• Stanford Center on Longevity and Max Planck Institute for Human Development, October 2014, A consensus on the brain training industry from the scientific community: longevity.stanford.edu
• Simons, D. J. and colleagues, 2016, Do brain training programs work? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(3): journals.sagepub.com
• Apple Support, If you want to cancel a subscription from Apple: support.apple.com
• Google Play Help, Cancel, pause, or change a subscription on Google Play: support.google.com
• Apple Developer, App privacy details on the App Store: developer.apple.com
• Google Play Help, Understand app privacy and security practices with Data safety: support.google.com
• Our own scale, the percentile rule and what we store: Skillido for AI and the privacy policy

Who wrote this

This article was written by the Skillido editorial team. Skillido is a product of Next Day Online B.V. in Wilp, the Netherlands, registered with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce under number 08198136. We sell one of the products discussed here, and you may want to weigh that as you read.

If something here is wrong, write to hallo@skillido.com and a person will correct the text. If you want to see first what you would be buying, take the test. It costs nothing.