After supplying the iPhone and Nokia markets, Liverpool FC has finally released their “Match & News Centre” app for Android. The application promises to be a one-stop shop for news and more. From the Google Play Store description:
The application includes:
– all the breaking news from the Club
– press transfer gossip
– in-game scores and results from all Premier League, Carling Cup and FA Cup games
– in-game text commentary, stats, teamsheets and more for Liverpool games
– player profiles from all the 1st team squad
– loads more.
What’s works?
- Appearance: The app is handsome on a phone,
- Navigation: A single row of section navigation buttons and single row of subsection buttons makes it painless to move around the app.
- Content: The app covers a lot of categories, from team news and transfer rumblings to gameday team sheets and postgame stats. It’s practically everything a Liverpool fan could want in one place.
- System Reqs: It only requires Android 1.6 to operate, which means that virtually every active Android device can run the LFC app.
What doesn’t? A lot of things.
- iClone: The LFC app is good looking, but is a clear iPhone port. Android has its own design guidelines (called “Holo”), which apps are slowly adapting to. The LFC app is an early release (version 1.41), so it’s not out of the question that it’ll be updated with the upper-left navigation sidebar and upper-right settings toggle in the future.
- Tablet Unfriendly: A fairly attractive app is reduced to an ugly mess on a larger screen because of scaling problems.
- Fullscreen: The full screen interface hides the status bar, making it impossible to keep an eye on notifications, time, or battery level while in the app.
- Busted Audio: The live game audio requires Flash to be installed on your phone and Adobe no longer allows new installs of Flash on Android devices, so if you didn’t already have Flash installed on your device or plan on upgrading ever, you’re out of luck.
- Busted Video: When attempting to play a video, the user selects either the native Video Player or the BBC AOR Browser Player…neither of which work.
From the Google Play Store reviews section
“After waiting SO long for this app, I am a little disappointed with what we have got. £2.99 for this is a bit steep. The UI looks great, load times are a little slow, even on wi-fi connection. In-app purchases for “subscriptions” are not for me… not after already paying for the app! Certain sections of the app don’t work – such as when trying to “log-in” to the store part of the app. I just end up with a blank white screen! If this was a first attempt at the app, i could accept these flaws, but this is version 1.41 and has been around for years on IOS! Good app with a few issues, hopefully an update comes alot quicker than we had to wait for this initial version! :) YNWA”
“I like the app, but for some reason the restore subscription button won’t work for me. I have an online subscription and want to carry it across to this device”
“Disappointing for 2.99 ticket news is from last season, no match reports from recent games still previews desperately needs updating,”
It’s a passable first release on Android, but the official LFC Match & News Centre is rough around the edges with broken features, severely outdated news, It looks nice, but needs adapting for Google’s platform and a lot of work behind the scenes to make it function 100%.
The LFC Match & News Centre available on Google Play Store for £2.99/$4.68, but requires a £1.99/$3.14 monthly app subscription for featured video and live game audio.
By Philip Kneitinger