Two free fruit match-three games, and what they really cost
Neither asks for money to install. Both ask for something else, and the amount differs enough to matter. This page separates the boards from the business model, and says plainly what each one does between levels.
- Titles
- Fruit Splash, Juice cube
- Cost to install
- Free, both
- Store data read
- 7 September 2026, Canada
Fruit Splash
Piyush Gaur_05
This is a small release from a single developer, and it is worth saying so up front because it explains both the charm and the rough edges. The board is a straightforward fruit match: swap two neighbours, clear three or more, watch the column refill.
What it does well is speed. There is no map screen, no story, no character to feed. You open it and you are on a board within two taps, which is more than can be said for most of the genre.
What it does less well is signposting. Special pieces exist but the game never explains them, and level goals appear as icons without text. You learn what a goal means by failing it once.
Free to install · contains ads · in-app purchases · rated for everyone
Juice cube
Criss Cross Games
A longer-running title with the full apparatus: a map of islands, a level number in the hundreds, and boards that introduce a new obstacle every dozen stages. The fruit is the same idea; the structure around it is much larger.
The board rule worth knowing is the cube. Matching next to one cracks it, and cracking the last one is often the actual goal rather than the score. Players who chase points instead of cubes stall for a long time before noticing.
It also runs a lives system. Fail a level and you spend one; they return slowly. If you play in one long sitting rather than short visits, that is the thing that will end the session, not the difficulty.
Free to install · contains ads · in-app purchases · rated for everyone
How much advertising sits between the levels
Both listings carry the same two labels: contains ads, and in-app purchases. The labels are identical; the experience is not, and this is where a free game is actually priced.
In practice there are three places advertising appears in games of this kind, and it is worth recognising them:
- A video after a failed level, offered as a way to continue. This one is opt-in and reasonable.
- A video between levels whether you failed or not. This one is not opt-in and is what makes a long session tiring.
- A banner along the bottom of the board. Harmless until it sits over the row you need to see.
Aeroplane mode removes most of it in both games, at the cost of anything that syncs. That is a legitimate way to play a free match-three game and neither developer forbids it.
One developer against a studio
| Point | Fruit Splash | Juice cube |
|---|---|---|
| Developer | A single independent developer | Criss Cross Games |
| Structure around the board | Almost none | Island map, hundreds of levels |
| Lives system | No | Yes |
| Explains its own rules? | Barely | Yes, with tutorials |
| Store labels | Ads, purchases | Ads, purchases |
| Time to first board | ~10 s | ~40 s |
Developer names and store labels come from the official listings. The rest describes our own installs and is opinion, not measurement.
Sound, grip and power for a long board
Fruit Splash and Juice Cubes both run with the sound on, both are played one-handed, and both are played until the battery says otherwise. That is three separate problems and there is a piece of hardware for each of them. Amounts are deliberately absent below: retail prices move week to week, so the link is the only honest place to read one.
-
Earbuds that are not the ones in the box
Match-three audio is almost entirely feedback: the pitch rises as a chain gets longer, and a cheap bud flattens that into the same click every time. Bluetooth is fine here — nothing in either game depends on reacting inside 100 ms, so the latency people warn about does not apply.
-
A grip case, not a slim one
Playing one-handed means the phone is held by four fingers while the thumb works. A case with a textured back or a moulded grip ring turns that into something you are not constantly re-catching. Slim cases do the opposite.
-
A clip-on cooling fan
Sustained play at full brightness heats a phone, and a hot phone throttles — which shows up as the board stuttering during the long cascades, exactly when it matters. A magnetic or clip cooler is a crude fix that works. Check it clips over a case, not just bare glass.
-
A power bank you can play from
The one specification worth checking is not capacity but pass-through: some banks stop charging when the phone is in use. For playing while charging you want USB-C power delivery, not the cheapest 20000 mAh on the list.
Each of those four links runs a search on Amazon and nothing more. No product is chosen for you, no order passes through this site, and Kavzuno receives nothing whether you buy or not.
A note from the person who writes this
I started this page because I could not find a straight answer to a small question: how much advertising is actually in a free match-three game before you install it. The store will not tell you, and neither will anything written about these games. So I installed both, played them with a stopwatch, and wrote down what happened.
That is the whole scope of the site. It is not a review outlet, there is no schedule, and if the numbers here stop matching what you see in the app, they are wrong and I would like to know. Both games are patched regularly and an advertising cadence is exactly the sort of thing a patch changes quietly.
— Liam Gauthier, [email protected]. How long I take to reply.