Let’s face it, the fashionable are glued to their phones…and why not? Anything you could possibly want now has an app at your fingers to provide instant gratification. That being said, not all apps are created equal so I decided to start road testing them to help save you some time.

The first on my list is Spring – Go Shopping which was named as one of Apple’s top apps to come out in 2014. Immediate drawbacks, it requires iOS 6.0 and is only available to Apple users. So for those of you who don’t have an iPhone, iPad or have made the switch to the Android, you are going to have to sit this one out.

In some ways it compares to another app which has become a fashionista fave known as LIKEtoKNOW.it, where shoppers can browse their favorite bloggers looks via instagram and when they are registered with the app, ‘liking’ a photo sends shopping details to their inbox so long as the ‘Grammer’ is a participant in the program. For bloggers, LIKEtoKNOW.it has been a great way to monetize their style but is kind of a pain for the consumer because you cannot directly shop from the app.

Spring on the other hand is one stop shopping and is free to download. Navigation is pretty simple, you pick your gender: Female, Male or Male + Female, simple enough, then you select keywords that describe the look you are going for and/or that describe your signature style. Based on those selections it chooses brands that associate with those keywords. This seems like a bit of a grey area. One girls ‘downtown’ is another girls ‘uptown’ so the app may eliminate brands or styles that you might actually like. It also seems fairly limiting because only brands that collaborate with Spring are available to you.

The major pro for Spring is the Instagram-style ‘feed’ you scroll through to check out goods. Even though you aren’t shopping your fave bloggers look, there are really cool stylized images for most products. So long as you like the options in your ‘feed’ you can shop fairly easily. Once you want to buy something you can select your size, shipping and pay within the app. Personally, I haven’t been too impressed with the items in my feed thus far, but to be fair I am still working on getting my mixture of keywords right so I can really make the most of it. All in all, if you like shopping and Instagram, Spring is a pretty cool app and totally worth playing with.

What fashion apps are your favorite?