I’ve always laughed at the “I never write reviews, but…” reviews. Well here’s karma, because it’s my turn. I don’t write many reviews (at all) but I am so happy with Lucid that I had to. The content is first-rate, the visuals and storyboarding work well for my ADHD self, the format is intuitive, the layout clean, the quizzes incredibly helpful, and like one review said… this has replaced my doom-scrolling of social media with valuable learning and growth. I crave this app. And I love it’s iPad friendly, too… makes reading so much more enjoyable. Side note: help is fantastic… I reached out over synching issues and the response was A+ from a genuinely helpful and concerned team. This is a great way to get the key concepts from the most relevant titles of our time… and if one really hits a home-run with you… it’s quite the test drive before you buy the full book. I can’t begin to count how many apps I delete after the trial period, so this is out of my norm… my trial period is up tomorrow… and I’m all-in for the full version. Test Lucid and really dive in… you’ll be glad you did.

I hate this app so much. Did a free trial and forgot to cancel. So I figure I should try to get into the app since it charged me $100+ for the year. The lessons are basically ChatGPT in what they think is an aesthetically pleasing layout. Seriously go ask ChatGPT to summarize one of the books on here and it’ll give you a better response. They’re not forming any insights, they’re copying what the books say. The “quizzes” are middle school questions that you only need to remember the exact phrasing of a sentence two slides ago. Fill in the blanks with two synonyms that could both work, but one’s “wrong” because they didn’t actually put any thought into this and just doing the bare minimum. I coming up on a year and I feel as though thyme could be upwards of 1000 book summaries on this app, but they’re hovering at around 120. Given the content going into these summaries, personally I feel as though I could churn out one a day if this was my full time job. Meanwhile they’ve added probably less than 20 in a year. If this app actually gave insights that aren’t available in a google search, and it included wayyyyy more books, it might be a good idea. Until then it’s a cash grab and a language model in app form that’s charging way more than most others which are free and better.

I was enjoying this app until today when I discovered that my course, Essential Philosophy, was cut short. Even though the app shows that I am in the middle of the course, with many more open circles to reach for, there are no more content sections available. The app says I’ll be notified when more content is available. I paid the full $100 for this app, so why am I not receiving the full content? It seems that the topic I’ve been studying is only half published. Does this mean that there are many other courses or topics that I can’t complete because they were never finished by the authors? Does this mean that I need to stick to the much shorter topic discussions with less content? The problem I have with that is that the nuggets of information on the shorter topics are basically book blurbs in comparison to the main courses. It appears that there is a lot of content on this app, but the more I look into it, the more I see courses that overlap and are duplicated in subject areas that are not relevant to my interest of study. This seems to suggest that there is more content than there really is. If there are tons of topics across many subjects that have unfinished content, what is the point of spending money on this app?