Advice: Making the Most of Swagbucks Video Apps Part 2

Here’s Part 2 of the Making the Most of Swagbucks Video Apps blog post series.

Additional Observations When Running Swagbucks Apps

• Bonus rounds allow your apps to continue earning SB even after you’ve hit the daily 10 SB limit. How many video cycles are necessary to complete a video set in the bonus round will constantly change. For example, in your first bonus round, you might need to complete 12 video cycles to complete the set and earn 2 SB. But during the second bonus round, it could change to 30 video cycles. I’ve noticed that as you complete bonus rounds, the number of video cycles required will tend to go up, although this isn’t always the case. On occasion, the number of video cycles required to complete a bonus round will stay the same for all bonus rounds.

• When you run out of bonus rounds, you’ll see “You’ve Reached today’s earning limit of SB. Please Keep Watching!” screen which means your app is completely maxed out for the day until it resets at 3am EST. Your app will continue to run, but you will not earn any SB. How many bonus rounds you can run and how many video cycles it’ll take to complete a video set appears to be random. However, my cynical side thinks that it’s subject to a secret formula that only Swagbucks knows or understands.

• The very last bonus round will not result in any SB. Let me explain. Let’s say your app is running videos in a bonus round that requires 20 video cycles to earn 2 SB. After one video cycle completes, the app will say you’ll need 19 more. After another video cycle is done, the app will indicate 18 more cycles are needed and so on. But after you complete the 20^th video cycle, instead of getting the 2 SB, the app will say “You’ve Reached today’s earning limit of SB. Please Keep Watching!” So basically, you watched a complete video set for 0 SB. As far as I know, there’s no way to know when this will happen.

• You cannot run multiple Swagbucks apps simultaneously on multiple devices under the same account name. However, you are allowed to run the Swagbucks app with any one of the other six (SB TV, EntertaiNow TV, Moviecli.ps, IndyMusic, Sportly TV and LifeStylz) at the same time. For instance, if you have the Swagbucks app running on your phone, you can have the IndyMusic app also running on your tablet. I’ve never done this to confirm and I’m a little too paranoid to do so. This is because it doesn’t actually increase your earnings, but only speeds it up slightly.

• Swagbucks will occasionally have apps that allow users to earn more than the 10 SB limit for a period of time (usually one day). The can do this several ways, such as allowing users to earn 4 SB per video set completed or raise the daily limit from 10 SB to 20 SB.

• When you’re in a bonus round, but can’t complete the video set to earn the 2 SB, all is not lost. When the app resets the next day, all those video cycles you watched in the bonus round will count toward your next set. For example, let’s say it’s Monday night and you’re running the EntertaiNow TV app which is in a bonus round that requires 26 video cycles to earn 2 SB. But before bed, you shut off your phone when EntertaiNow TV app had completed only 22 video cycles. When you start up the app after it resets, you’ll see something that looks like this:

Attribution: Author’s Own Work

This means that all you need to do is complete one video cycle (instead of the usual six) in the EntertaiNow TV app to earn 2 SB. Let’s change this example and say your app only completed 2 video cycles in the bonus round. When the app resets, you’ll only need to complete 4 video cycles to earn 2 SB in the EntertaiNow TV app.

While we’re on the topic of number of video cycles per bonus rounds, you might wonder how you can tell if you’re in the bonus round and if so, how many video cycles are needed to complete a bonus round video set. It’s really simple, but took me months of using the apps to figure it out. First of all, don’t rely on that colored bar that moves from left to right (you’ll see it’s fully colored in with the above picture). You could have 8 videos left (out of say, 12 total) and the bar may be almost filled in. Or you could have two videos left (out of 14 videos in the set), but the bar is barely filled in. Why this is the case, I don’t know.

Second, to get the actual number of video cycles remaining for completion of the video set (or manually determine if you’re in a bonus round without having to wait until a video cycle has completed), you’ll need to click on the main menu for the app. You can find it by tapping on the top left icon consisting of 3 horizontal bars. You can see it in the top left of the below picture. From there, tap on your Swagbucks account name and it’ll show you how many videos you have remaining. Unfortunately, it won’t tell you how many total videos you needed to complete the current video set, but that’s not very useful information considering how the number of video cycles per video set changes for each bonus round.

Attribution: Author’s Own Work

• If you notice that your app isn’t working right (such as a black screen, endless loading circles, etc.), it may mean a newer version is required. You can get the newest version by uninstalling it then reinstalling it. I know it stinks because you’ll lose that favorite short video, but you have no choice.

• If you go to the Google Play or Apple App Store and don’t see the app that needs updating, it probably means your phone or tablet can no longer run it. This happened to me in the second half of 2017 when my 4.4 KitKat Samsung Galaxy Core Prime was no longer able to run the Swagbucks apps. But what’s interesting is that the apps won’t all stop working at once. Maybe two or three apps will stop working, but the others may continue to work. But eventually, they will all stop working.

So there you have it. That’s most of what I’ve learned from running the Sawgbucks video apps over the years. If you have any additional tips or tricks, please feel free to share in the comments below.