As of Nov 2013 this app appears 2nd on the list in Google Play when searching for “drum machine”. What a pity as it must have wasted the time of a lot of people.

Dubstep drum pads is a simple pad based sample trigger app. You press the pads, and a sample sounds. One of the fundamental difficulties with this sort of app is the screen to sound latency. To play anything even remotely in time, you need to mentally adjust and tap in advance of the beat. If your device’s latency changes now and then, you’ll struggle to play anything in time.

screenshot 1

There is a crippled metronome, in that you can choose speeds from 120, and 130, 135, 140 and 145. That’s it. I guess that suits most dubstep? I doubt it.

screenshot 2

It’s possible to record your tapping, and you can play these back. If you long hold on the song name you can export, but it simply copies the file to your music folder, rather than using one of the most valuable features of Android, which is the ability to choose an app to deal with your data. That’s an Android development basic, so it really fails for me in this regard.

This is a toy, not a serious music making app, and how it has over a million downloads with a rating of 4.5 is completely beyond me.