The BBC have announced today on their Internet Blog that their brand new iPlayer apps for Android and the iPad should available by the end of this week.
While the iPad app has been long awaited, the news that the Android app will launch simultaneously has to be great news for little green robot lovers everywhere. It’s frequently the case that apps launch on iOS with Android versions lagging far behind, indeed the BBC is yet to launch it’s News app for Android many months after the iOS version hit the app store.
The only slight disappointment is that the Android app will require Flash 10.1 to be installed. I’m not sure why this is the case when the iPad doesn’t support Flash in any form but it means that owners of older and/or less powerful handsets need not apply.
On a final note, having used the frankly awesome iPlayer web app on my iPod Touch I’m still not quite sure why standalone actual apps are needed in the first place.
The iPlayer website is optimised for my HTC Desire running. I’ve been using it for a while and its brilliant over a wireless connection.
@spudgun
I know. That uses flash too. The iOS iPlayer uses H.264 which makes use of the iPhone’s hardware acceleration for decoding which saves on battery life.
The article over at TechRadar says they wanted to support older Android versions but technically they cannot. It’s apparantly more complicated to code on Android than iOS.
Websites have their place but Apps often beat them. There is no re-loading needed with a BBC iPlayer app, it will be formatted better for the screen and not waste space with browser UIs. A proper search function will also be required and also included such things as download options. In short a BBC iPlayer App is more efficent.
I could access the BBC iPlayer website on my Desire but currently use BeebPlayer or MyPlayer, both still working.
And it is on the Android market now.
Android app doesn’t have Five Live Sports Extra! Shame will almost never use because of this omission!