Gems Match: Color Puzzle

Playing version 1.8.3 on an iPhone. I like this game. I like it so much that I have paid to remove ads and to add an extra row to the register. There's a good mix of challenging levels and easier levels. Sometimes the challenging levels have more colors or smaller color blocks or even are a larger puzzle that have to be solved in sections. This helps keep the game interesting. Unfortunately, today, June 2, the game started crashing in the middle of playing levels. My progress is always saved, but it is annoying. Two issues: 1. Sometimes the colors are really similar to the point that it's hard to tell them apart. For example the black and navy are often in distinguishable. You will tap a set of gems and then tap where you think they should go, and they won't flow, because it's the wrong color. Because I'm playing on a phone with a smaller screen, it's not always obvious that the problem is the color and not that I've tapped in the wrong place, so I retry placing them several times. This delays me and sometimes results in me not finishing the level in the allotted time. Red/orange, white/cream, and two shades of yellow are also difficult. 2. Another thing that's annoying is that as you put gems in the register, they are often not sorted by color. For example, you might pick up a few red, a few black, and a few yellow, and initially they will go into the register in the order that you click them. If you then go and add more red ones, the register will sort them by color. Normally this is a good thing, but I sometimes have a problem because of how quickly it sort them after I drop new gems. I might intend to pick up the black and move my finger over them, but in that time it has restored and I end up picking up a different color. It would be really nice if there was a delay in the sorting, especially if it could wait until you have picked up gems off the board before changing the order of gems in the register.

I really enjoy this game, I’ve been playing for months and while the ads are definitely super annoying, they haven’t been bad enough for me to pay for no ads. However, one thing I’ve discovered is that on multi step levels, there are ads after every part of the puzzle. This is certainly annoying (reasonably there could be an ad after each level, but definitely not after each part of one level). But what is particularly unacceptable is that the ads take up time during the puzzle. For example level 476 has 4 parts and a timer of 9:00 minutes. I ended the first part with 7:10 left. This was followed by an ad. After x-ing out of the ad (which also took three separate X clicks) I returned to the puzzle to find that the timer was now at 6:50. Losing 20 SECONDS to closing an ad is crazy. Why do ads count as part of the allotted time, especially when there are so many with one after EVERY PART OF THE 4 PART PUZZLE ????

I’ve spent over $15 at this point on the game, and for some reason my purchases aren’t showing up anymore. I have clicked restore purchases multiple times & it will not restore the purchases… it says “restore successful” but it’s not. I then deleted and re installed thinking maybe that would work, but nope. Instead it’s worse now, because even after clicking restore purchases multiple times & it stating that it was successful…. it wants me to re buy everything I’ve already bought. Very irritated and I want my money back if I’m not going to be able to use what I’ve bought. And after reading MANY reviews, it looks like this is a common issue of people purchasing the no ads etc and then still having ads or not getting their purchases. The developers of this game are just stealing my money at this point. I will be reporting this to Apple!