The company that charges customers north of $90 a month for cell phone service with a tiny data plan has introduced Verizon Cloud, a ho-hum free cloud storage add-on for Android devices that is leaving customers cold.

Verizon Wireless is applying the same stingy standards to its online backup service it uses for its paltry data plans, providing customers with less storage than the competition:

• Verizon Wireless: 500MB
• Dropbox: 2GB
• Google Drive: 5GB
• SkyDrive: 7GB

Run over your allowance? A premium plan comes with premium pricing: $2.99 per month for 25GB up to $9.99 per month for 125GB.

The ‘could you spare it’-storage allowance is bad enough, but the service’s performance is much, much worse judging from more than 5,700 scathing customer reviews. The majority of users rate Verizon’s app just one star, primarily because they couldn’t give it zero stars.

“It’s disappointing that Verizon would release this piece of crap and then encourage people to download it,” writes Andrew Gardner.

That’s okay Andrew. Verizon is gradually pushing the app to compatible phones with no uninstall option. Those using Verizon’s Backup Assistant will find all their content automatically transferred over to Verizon Cloud whether they want it floating there or not.

“I can’t wait not to use this,” shared Gabriel Rodriguez.

Some customers don’t want Verizon force-feeding apps on their phones, particularly ones designed to chew at their data plan allowance while unintentionally crashing their smartphones.

“This app is responsible for 99% of the crashes on my poor, aging Droid X over the last few months,” writes Tim Odell. “The update came through and was like ‘you must sign up for….’ Seeing any changes and a “plus” associated with a Verizon mandate also left me assuming it would (secretly) cost me money. For my troubles I’m awarded 1-2 crashes per day.”

“Verizon apps run flawlessly as long as you allow them to do whatever they want (ie. turn off your Wi-Fi) and use your data plan without your knowledge,” offers David Lawrence. “[A Verizon rep told me] ‘It’s good for business [and] job security.’ At this point I didn’t have enough bread crumbs to find my way home. Maybe she had just come from an internal training seminar and she missed the ‘don’t repeat this to a customer’ part. Or, maybe, we have come to a point in this world where some people are completely blind to theft and unfairness, as long as it’s marketed as ‘good business’. Either way, the app sucks.”