If you’re looking for a phone to run Perk TV on, here’s the short version: there’s nothing to buy a phone for anymore. Perk TV — the app that paid users in gift cards for watching video ads and playing games in the background — was discontinued years ago, and no phone, new or old, will bring it back.
What actually happened to Perk TV
Perk.com, the company behind Perk TV, was acquired by RhythmOne plc in December 2016. Following the acquisition, the Perk apps were wound down, and Perk TV was formally shut down on December 1, 2019. The app was removed from app stores and the reward-earning service stopped operating entirely. There is no current version, no relaunch, and no legitimate way to run Perk TV today — any app or APK claiming to be a revived or working version of Perk TV should be treated as, at best, unrelated software using the old name, and at worst something worse.
The current reward-app landscape
The category Perk TV belonged to — apps that pay small rewards for attention, surveys, or everyday purchases — is still very much alive, just under different names. A few that remain active and legitimate as of 2026:
- Google Opinion Rewards — a free survey app for Android and iOS that pays modest credit (often redeemable toward app store or Play Store balances) for answering short surveys.
- Swagbucks — one of the longest-running reward platforms, active since 2008, offering points for surveys, watching videos, and online shopping that convert to gift cards or PayPal cash.
- Fetch Rewards — turns everyday shopping receipts into points redeemable for gift cards, with no video-watching component at all.
Each of these has a genuinely current, actively maintained app — worth confirming for yourself in your phone’s app store before installing anything, since the reward-app space does turn over regularly.
Do you need a specific phone for reward apps?
No. Unlike Perk TV’s old background-video-watching model, which some users tried to run on a dedicated spare phone to maximize passive earnings, today’s reward apps are built around active engagement — answering a survey, scanning a receipt, watching a specific video to completion. There’s no meaningful advantage to running them on a special or older phone; any phone capable of running a current-generation Android or iOS app store will work identically well. If you already own a smartphone, it’s already the right hardware for this.
A word of caution
Because Perk TV still gets searched for years after shutting down, it’s a magnet for old app-store listings, dead links, and the occasional bad-faith app trying to capture that lingering search traffic. If an app claims to be Perk TV specifically, verify carefully before installing it — the original service is gone, and nothing legitimately operating today carries that name.