184 iPlayer for Android – Android App Review

I wouldn’t normally rise to this but your “review” got me riled. Once you know the history it quickly becomes obvious that I-player for android is a pile of of proverbial dung for the following reasons:

Admittedly the U.I. is simple and intuitive. That’s where the fun ends.

1. It won’t let you download/cache files on your device for playback later. This is essential for those on a restrictive data plan or if you’re somewhere with a bad signal. The same goes for if you are moving on a train or in a car. There’s no getting around the fact that mobile data in these scenarios if intermittent at best and that these are the very times when people would want to use an app like this.

2. Playback with flash is choppy, even on 1ghz processor phones. It keeps on improving with every instalment of flash admittedly however, given that android devices are perfectly capably of playing the mp4/m4a streams available to I-phone users and that the prospects with HTML5 seem so bright the insistence on flash dependency seems absurd. Flash is the technology of now, not tomorrow.

3. Radio playback requires that the biggest battery drain of all on any mobile device, namely the screen, remain on. Not only will this destroy your battery rapidly but it also rules out putting your headphones on and popping your phone in your pocket because you can’t lock the screen! The app won’t even run in the background so the radio will cut off as soon as you want your multifunctional smartphone to do any one of the other thousand things you might want from it.

These criticisms are severe. The BBC’s android app is a major disappointment. This disappointment is compounded by the way in which the BBC have acted to snub out any competition the iplayer app arena.

Months before the release of the official I-player app, which was laboriously slow in arriving, there were already 2 great alternatives which offered solutions to all of the problems outlined here. These applications were beebplayer and myplayer. Beebplayer development stopped and the app was pulled as a consequence of legal pressure from the bbc, and myplayer removed all BBC content links instead working with other providers like itv and 4od, the whole reason de etre for the app. Both of these apps were superior in terms of the functionality they provided and the BBC squeezed them both out of the competition picture with their legal team, and to what end? To give us this piecemeal piece of crap.

The piracy defence, which is the only plausible , if misguided reason for insisting on using flash to deliver content in this way exclusively to everything that’s not an i phone, is founded on the ludicrous assumption that substandard mobile stream quality material is in any way food for pirates.

There you go people, there’s your review. Now go and complain to the BBC because they have impoverished your access to BBC content on the android platform.