A £90,000 smartphone app developed to promote tourism and events in Tendring has been downloaded just 385 times in more than a year.

Tendring Council’s scrutiny committee questioned how many people had downloaded the Love Tendring app at a meeting.

It was hoped the free-to-download app would help promote the district and increase income through extra ticket sales at the council-run Princes Theatre in Clacton.

But one scathing review on the Apple App Store said: “For the money invested, the end result is poor and I fail to see the point of it.

“If this is meant to be an aid to attract visitors, then it needs more attractive and not look like it was put together in someone’s bedroom during five minutes of boredom.”

Clacton councillor Mark Stephenson questioned officers as to why more people were not downloading it.

He said: “I did a quick straw poll of councillors at a meeting and not one of us had it on our phones.”

John Higgins, head of IT at the council, told the committee his team was developing the app further for the next season, including linking it to Beach Patrol to provide visitors with real-time advice in relation to crowd numbers.

“As far as how many users we have got, it is not a great story,” he said.

“The app went live in August last year, towards the end of the summer season.

“We started to get quite good returns in the amount of money from the theatre increasing, then, we had winter and Covid-19 and we had no tourism to advertise in terms of events.

“There’s only 235 downloads from the Apple app store and from a high of 150 Android Play Store downloads in August of last year, than has dropped down to 64.

“Users are not large in numbers at the moment, but bear in mind we have nothing to promote. The app is sitting there dormant a little bit.”

Chief executive Ian Davidson said one of the first major events it would have promoted would have been the Mayflower 400 celebrations which have been postponed until next year.

The app would have allowed visitors to Harwich to interact with museum displays.

“It is a tourism app and we were thwarted this year,” he said. “It does need to have a proper launch.”