Quidco review

We review the new location-aware Quidco, an app that delivers vouchers and freebies to your iPhone as you walk through the shop's door

We remember when a corporate competition - on the back of a Corn Flakes packet, a bag of Crisps, or on Tiz Waz - required you to answer a question that was more challenging than 'What's your mobile phone number (so we can hassle you forevermore, forevermore)?'

These days questions to get a special offer are just a rouse to engineer your consent so a company can invade your privacy with a clear conscience. Your only other option to get a freebie voucher is to trawl a series of oft suspicious website, packed with adverbs and affiliate links that rarely result in a saving.

Thank the heavens then for the new spate of iPhone apps that genuinely want to offer you a discount or a voucher for your participation - and the prerequisite personal data intrusion, of course. The latest addition to this burgeoning genre is Quidco, which promises a growing library of special offers that are just around the corner; both figuratively speaking, and literally.

This app, you see, is interested in your physical location, and uses this geographical data to deliver vouchers, offers and exclusive deals from nearby businesses. In many respects it follows the precedent set down by the likes of Foursquare, requiring you to 'check in' to locations as you go through the door.

Although some businesses are happy to broadcast their special offers a bit more publicly, Quidco also gives shops, restaurants, pubs, and service providers the option to deliver their vouchers depending on your patronage. These offers don't actually land on your iPhone until you check in to the actual high street premises, and although it's early days yet, from what we've seen these check in-specific offers seem to be a bit more giving than their more available counterparts.

You can search by company name if you're going somewhere specific, but perhaps more useful is its location-based offers that tell you where and how much you can save within a certain radius. You can call up Google Maps, too, and have the app plot out any nearby offers visually, which is a great way to make a decision on where you want to shop, as well as finding out what's nearby.

Quidco also brings you an in-app 'cashback' system, which returns a portion (in our currently location, between 2.5 and 8 per cent depending on the offer) of the money you spend to your Quidco account. That's not to say you're expected to spend in order to use Quidco - this is a free app, beginning to end - but spending after checking in can return actual cash discounts to your card.

What might make the more paranoid among us flinch, and quite rightly, is you must enter your card details into the Quidco app, which checks the number off against the card used during the cashback-compatible purchase in order to route the saving back to you. It already asks for a fair amount of personal data, enough to make the privacy conscious wary, and while intentions are undoubtedly admirable, it feels like a big ask allowing your credit card number to float around the digital ether in such a manner.

But potential security concerns aside, Quidco must be applauded for being a lot more open and reciprocal than the majority of its voucher-based competitors. Naturally its success hinges on the quality and quantity of its deals, so we'll have to wait and see if the Quidco craze catches on. But from what we can tell, it's got all the ingredients to build a successful bridge between consumer and local businesses - so long as those vouchers give us something we want.

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