“You can earn money just for downloading apps.”
If you’re like me, the above sounds too good to be true, but also too good not to at least try it out.
So just a couple of days ago, I installed Fuhla, a local app that literally pays you to download other apps. Or in their words, they’re an app trying community.
YouthsToday
First, here’s some background on the company behind the app. Fuhla is an app by YToday Sdn Bhd of YouthsToday.com.
Founded in 2013 by local entrepreneur, Jazz Tan, their mission is to fund, educate, and support students and young professionals by turning their ideas into successful projects through experiential events.
YouthsToday.com has connected over 329 corporate brands with millions of youths across the world through student events, with over 90,000 active youth event organisers connected to their portal.
Through YouthsToday, brands can reach out to young consumers through events, marketing campaigns and social media.
In turn, youths can seek out corporate sponsors for their own student or extracurricular events.
It’s a novel idea that helps youths keep busy while giving corporate brands access to an active and influential demographic.
Fuhla may well be YouthsToday’s latest attempt at disrupting how companies (or in this case, apps) reach their audience. But let’s see if it manages to do so, shall we?
Dollars For Downloads
One thing I have to mention before anything else, however, is that Fuhla is only available on the Google Play store.
The way Fuhla works is simple: it gives you a list of apps to try out. At the time of writing, there are 25 apps on Fuhla to download.
Each app is listed with the amount of money you will get by downloading them, which will be added to the wallet that comes with your Fuhla account.
So far, it looks like the earnings can range from as high as RM1.20 per app, to as low as nothing, which makes me wonder why we would even try out those apps then.
We’ll be reaching out to the Fuhla team to get some answers for that, after which we’ll update this piece.
Additionally, if you get people to sign up using your unique referral code (mine’s 0025001, in case you’re interested), this will earn you RM1.50 per sign up.
Unfortunately, signing up with a referral code doesn’t seem to get you anything in return, so you’d be doing this purely out of the kindness of your heart.
For the purposes of this review, I downloaded all the apps available to see how much I can earn through that process alone.
Perhaps because they know how easy it is for users to just download the apps, cash out, and delete them, Fuhla grants you half the money first.
You’ll only receive the rest of the amount after you keep the apps for 30 days. If you uninstall a particular app within those 30 days, the money you earned from it will be deducted from your wallet.
You will also get 1 or 2 sen for opening the apps on a daily basis.
This process could have been made easier, as with the number of apps I’ve downloaded, I would often forget which app I have opened for the day.
As you can see, I’ve downloaded all 25 apps, and have been opening them daily in the last two days, earning me RM3.61 thus far.
Well, that’s enough for one drink, I thought, so after keying in my bank details, I tried to cash out. But it looks like you can’t cash out until you reach at least RM10.
After tallying up the money I would get with my current number of apps, I was dismayed to find out that I would only get RM6.80 in total (minus the few sen I get from the daily payouts.)
So, it would seem I had to wait a little longer for more apps to show up on Fuhla before I could enjoy the fruits of my labour.
I’ll admit that I was rather disappointed at not being able to get anything for my efforts immediately. But after stepping back and looking over the apps, I’ve come to realise that it’s not about the money.
But It’s Not All About The Money
It’s a minuscule amount of money, really, and it’s hardly an incentive, but what I actually gained was the discovery of apps that I could actually use.
Some of these apps I knew about already, but just never got around to installing them. Fuhla gave me the final push to actually do it.
I can honestly say that I will be keeping some of the apps I downloaded such as Milkadeal, Newswav, and XTVT, for instance.
Currently, most of these apps are Malaysian ones and some aren’t really well known.
According to Fuhla, the more downloads an app gets, the more users pay attention to them. The number of downloads helps with the app’s Google ranking too.
So, if you have the storage space and the time for it, you could show these apps some love through Fuhla and earn some pocket change while you’re at it.
Finally, as mentioned earlier, its’s going to take a while for me to see if I can actually reach the RM10 goal and cash out, so stay tuned to learn about the conclusion of my Fuhla experience.
