Who doesn’t want to get paid for playing video games? This series follows mobile applications, some of which are borderline games at best, that claim to reward users with cold hard cash (or gift cards). In my pursuit of extra cash to blow on games, or Steam gift cards to add to my collection, I have tried a number of these applications. I hope my experiences can help others steer clear of the more dubious of these applications.
In this article, I will be taking a look at Coin Pop, a free application released by Game Pop Company in 2018. Normally I would link to the company web-site here, but they don’t have one on the Google Play store. They do have a link to their privacy policy here. Going to the main address from that page redirects to the AppLike Group, who make no mention of this app on their site.
Getting back to the application, it is not really a game itself, but more of what is known as a “loyalty reward” app. In a nutshell, you get points for playing various games through their platform, which can then be cashed out for gift cards. Having covered MistPlay and Stormplay already, after this article I will move on to some of the actual games. While there are more applications like this out there, these are some that I have first-hand experience using.
After downloading the application, the first thing it will ask is to link to your Google Play account and give permissions to run continuously in the background. It does this in order to monitoring the activity on your phone to tell what you are playing. This may be a big negative for some more security-conscious gamers. The minimum information you need to provide to create an account is your age, gender, and an e-mail address to create a profile.
The way you get rewarded in Coin Pop is by downloading and playing the games that they offer. You earn coins, the in-app currency, for the amount of time spent being active in those games. The number of coins earned a minute typically starts high and then decreases the more time you play a game.
When you earn enough points, you can cash them out for a variety of gift cards or get paid via PayPal. The gift cards offered at the time of this writing are Amazon, PlayStation, BJ’s, Starbucks, Nike, T.G.I. Friday’s, Walmart, and Xbox. It takes approximately 10,000 coins to earn one dollar. The exchange rate gets slightly better the more you save up, encouraging users to delay cashing out.
The current rates offered seems to be about 10-100 coins for a minute of play. At the high end, that would mean a hundred minutes to earn 10,000 coins, or $1, right? Except that the reward time slowly increases. It starts at one minute, then grows to a minute and a half, and so forth. So you would be making less than a dollar an hour playing games on this app.
I originally used this not too long after it came out in 2018. The rewards were higher then and it took me about two months of playing games to earn $5. I expect it would take longer now, and I see a lot of recent complaints on the Google Play store that they “broke” the application. One side note to this, I was sent 5 euros via PayPal, instead of 5 dollars, even though I am located in the U.S.
Replaying it now, I also found that the application paid out less rewards than it said it would. Playing a game that said it would pay out 10 coins a minute over several minutes, displayed several pop-ups that I had earned 10 coins. However, after exiting and returning to Coin Pop, I had only earned four coins in total.
With the current state of this application, I cannot really recommend it. Unless you really want to get payouts via PayPal, or they fix their current issues, then there are better service applications that you can use to get paid for playing games. The application currently has a 3.9/5 on the Google Play store. I would give it a “C-/D+” rating, or a 4/10 stars.
If you want to try out Coin Pop, you can download it from the Google Play store here. They offer a referral bonus of 250 coins, or about two and a half cents. I am not posting my code, as I don’t intend to keep using the application at this time, but I am letting people know that this feature exists.