I too have been playing Touch Pets Dogs since it was released. I did actually purchase one of the $0.99 food bowl apps. Mostly, I was curious how it worked. I have since downloaded “8″ free food apps. I have nearly 100 bowls of food currently. Mind you, I don’t play it very often these days, but I still keep downloading all the free food bowl apps I can.

Another game like this is Tap Tap Revenge 3.0. It was $0.99 to start with, but went free. I have purchased a few tracks of musicians I really like. However, I also have well over 100 tracks of music that was free and there are new free tracks coming out each month.

There are other games that pretty much do make you pay to actually play the game even though they start out free. These games are pretty much just the “FREE” type games that used to come out with the paying game back before in-app purchases. I really like this since you only have to download the app once if you really like it.

I would love to see Apple implement a “trial” period for apps so that someone can download the full paid app for a period of time to see if it’s something they could use. There are quite a few apps out there that don’t have “FREE” versions to check out first. Pretty much all the other categories other than Games fits that description.

As far as the many negative reviews go, I rely on other sources for reviews of apps I am interested in. There are quite a few blogs out there now that do reviews. Video sites typically have short videos of game play or app usage that helps too.

I never rely on the AppStore’s reviews to decide on an app.