Is Hawk Tuah Girl's App a Scam?
Ariel investigates the legitimacy of the Hawk Tuah Girl's new dating assistant app, Pooky Tools, uncovering its poor user experience, questionable monetization tactics, and lackluster performance. He provides insights for app developers and questions whether the app qualifies as a scam.
Did you know the Haw Tua Girl launched a mobile app? Her new app is called Pooky Tools, and it’s a dating assistant. Is this app legit, or is it just another AI scam? You have to give her credit; the Haw Tua Girl became famous after a TikTok video went viral, and she managed to turn her overnight success into internet stardom. Now, she’s apparently venturing into mobile apps.
When it launched, I expected it to go viral. I mean, why wouldn’t it? The Haw Tua Girl has millions of followers on Instagram and hundreds of thousands of subscribers to her podcast, which at one point was the second most popular podcast on Spotify, right below The Joe Rogan Experience. But here’s the thing: the app didn’t go viral at all. It didn’t even reach 10,000 downloads. Stick around, because there’s a little tip in here for app developers.
App Store Analysis
I started by looking at the app's App Store page, and I can quickly tell you that its App Store Optimization (ASO) isn’t amazing—I’m being really nice here. The name doesn’t have any keywords and doesn’t explain what it does. The subtitle is very basic, and the keywords aren’t useful. The downloads per rating (DPR) is super high, which is terrible. The screenshots are very basic, and the description reads like a list of features that looks like something generated by ChatGPT.
Overall, it’s pretty clear that it’s some sort of thin wrapper on top of ChatGPT. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but those types of apps tend to make a lot more money. So, I had to download it and see why it’s not making any money like those other thin wrappers.
User Experience and Paywall
Upon downloading, I was immediately presented with a hard paywall. This is when you download a free app but can’t really start using it until you pay. There’s no onboarding, no trial—just a hard paywall that can’t be dismissed, asking for $5 a week or $50 a year. Yes, that much money! Apple forbids hard paywalls and rejects apps that do this, but if you’ve ever submitted an app to the App Store, you know Apple’s app review is so consistently inconsistent that this must have slipped through the cracks.
I was about to quit the app and delete it from my phone, which is typically what a hard paywall deserves. But I was still curious to see what was going on inside, so I paid the $5 so you don’t have to. If you’re happy that I did, let me know by giving this video a like and dropping a comment to let me know which app or apps I should explore in future videos.
Features and Functionality
I wasn’t really sure what to expect from a dating assistant, but I had a guess. What I found was similar to my expectations: it’s a list of tools to help with using dating apps. I had to figure it all out on my own because there’s really no onboarding. Talk about an MVP—Minimum Viable Product. Here, I mean the most minimalist of all, not the most valuable player, because the value is kind of limited.
The tools are all using ChatGPT with a custom prompt—that’s it. One tool lets you estimate the height of a person from a photo, which wasn’t very accurate in my experience; it was really off. Others give you suggestions for chat messages, which overall is what you would expect. The prompts are very basic, and I was able to get the AI to tell me its instructions and confirm it’s really ChatGPT under the hood. I even got it to tell me how to make pasta sauce, which is my test to confirm it’s really ChatGPT.
Beyond the basic prompts, the app’s experience and graphics are pretty simple, and there are no transitions between screens. Seriously, who does that? This led me to check if the app is native or not. Can you guess? No, of course, it’s not. It was built with Flutter. I’m not trying to highlight Flutter here because I don’t think the poor experience is Flutter’s fault, but Flutter devs, is it really hard to animate transitions in Flutter? Let me know in the comments; I’m curious.
User Reviews and Feedback
We’re not done yet because I checked the reviews—the few reviews it has—and they’re hilarious. The negative ones are spot on, complaining about the lack of a trial and that it’s just a money grab. The positive ones can’t be any more fake. I’m going to drop a link to a few of my favorites in the description of the video in case you need some entertainment. They’re really funny!
Whoever built this app spent very little time on it, and when I say very, I mean very little time. The poor user experience and hard paywall are what kept the app from going viral and getting any real downloads. Our estimates show that the app got 6,800 downloads since it was released, but almost all of those downloads—94%—came in its first week. After that, downloads dropped so low that we can’t even estimate the last few days; it’s that low.
Key Takeaway for Developers
Here’s a tip for developers, the tip I promised earlier: Apple helps new apps by giving them a 7-day boost in search even if their ASO isn’t good. That’s what happened here, and that’s what will happen to your app, so make sure you use it. But then the week was over, and because the app’s ASO was bad, the discovery ended.
Website Evaluation
The last check I did was to explore the app’s website. Most high-profile apps have a decent website or at least something, but this website was lacking. There was just a privacy policy, probably written by ChatGPT, and an empty homepage—literally an empty page. The website isn’t even hosted on its own domain; it’s on a Google Sites domain, so someone didn’t even try.
Conclusion: Is Pooky Tools a Scam?
Now, is Pooky Tools a scam? Poor experience and bad design aren’t illegal; they’re just not good. But a hard paywall is definitely scammy. I’m sure if Costa, the app hunter, was still active, he’d call it a scam. What do you think?
✨ This transcript was generated and enhanced by AI and may differ from the original video.
