Should Nymphs & Wets Be Your Go-To App for Fly Tying Techniques?

When learning how to fly fish, the most difficult thing for many people is knowing how to tie flies, knots, and various patterns. It's definitely an enjoyable past-time, and can pay off with some great fish, but you've got to get a start somewhere. This free app will get you this beginning, teaching you the most basic nymphs, wets, and other fly fishing essentials. Once you've mastered those, you can unlock more advanced flies, knots, and patterns and learn them as well. The app uses detailed pictures along with great text to help you get things right the first time and every time.

When you're trying to learn how to tie a fly, you need a good instructor. This app does provide that, with excellent tutorials on how to tie the flies you need, from the most basic to the highly detailed and complex. It offers various categories of techniques, and gives you a healthy selection of different knots and patterns to make use of.

If your eyes aren't very good, each image in the tutorials has a zoom function. You just tap on it, and you get a more detailed, larger view of the image and its accompanying text.

Whether you want to learn the Alexandra, the Black Zulu, or one of dozens of other fly fishing favorites, you'll find them within this app with detailed images and well-written instructions.

Now, the drawbacks. This app makes heavy use of full-screen advertisements. I'm not opposed to monetizing your app, but the developers seem to have gone hog-wild here.

With every screen change, you have to wait at least five seconds for an interactive ad to play before you can tap the X to dismiss it and go where you wanted to be in the first place.

If you're in a hurry to get that fly tied, this isn't the app for you. The ads are annoying enough that I'll be deleting the app from my iPhone in very short order. Then again, maybe I'll forget about fishing and just download one of the games the app keeps pushing on me. Not really, but you get my point.

Not only does Nymphs & Wets make extensive use of in-app ads, but it tries to monetize in other ways, too. This app has more in-app purchases than I've ever seen in its type before.

First, there's an in-app purchase to get rid of the ads. That's one purchase.

You can also spend money to unlock all of the tutorials in each category.

Finally, the app offers you the option to remove all ads and unlock all of the fly tutorials, for another, heftier charge.

Truthfully, the ads shouldn't pop up so often. Most apps only have them once or twice a day. The lack of much content also makes this app pretty frustrating.

This just isn't the app for me, and it's a shining example of what happens when developers get a bit too much on the greedy side. There are far too many ads, and not enough free content, to make this worth the space it takes on my iPhone. Truthfully, it's probably a great app, but I just can't get past all of the ads and other in-app purchases to make the most of it.