Have you ever tried to find a good flashlight app in the App Store? You might as well close your eyes and download one at random, you will either get a slow app, or a hideous app. Take your pick.
Actually, if we are honest, there really is only one aspect of a flashlight app that matters: speed.
To that end I downloaded all of these:
I’d take the time to name them all, and link to every single one, but there’s one problem: all of them but one sucks. So instead I am just going to number them from the top corner to the bottom and tell you one thing about each: their speed.
### Side Note
Why are all flashlight apps called: `flashlight something`. Twitter developers can come up with neat names, ditto weather devs, so what’s wrong withe flashlight developers? This is another reason it’s very difficult to link to each app.
### The Speed
With a fresh reboot on my iPhone (running iOS 6b4) and no flashlight apps present in the multi-tasking tray, I launched each app and timed the speed until the LED light came on, to the best of my abilities.
Here’s the key:
Here’s the results:
1. 1.6s
2. 3.3s
3. 3s
4. did not launch to an “on” LED
5. 2.1s
6. 1.6s
7. 1.1s
8. did not launch to an “on” LED
9. 2.2s
10. 2.4s
11. 2.1s
12. 1.8s
13. 1.2s
14. did not launch to an “on” LED
15. 4s
16. 2.4s
The winner is #7, also known as, Lighty. It’s a paid app (bonus points) with a decent icon and decent UI. More than that it is just the fastest of the lot. There are probably about 4,324,322 other flashlight apps, but these were the only ones I tested.
### Launch Center Pro
When I polled Twitter to see what flashlight apps they were using, I got a ton of people saying they use Launch Center Pro. I did too, but then Launch Center Pro moved off of my home screen making it a bit harder to use. My main issue with using Launch Center Pro is that it takes two taps to activate the light — I want one tap to activate the light so I can get to it as fast as I can.
### Lighty
If you are a person that uses a flashlight app on your iPhone, I have to say: of the 16 flashlight apps I tested, [Lighty](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lighty-flashlight-for-iphone/id391503046?mt=8) is the best.