The Afrinolly Android App Review By Techloy [PHOTOS]

The Afrinolly app review has finally arrived and we’re excited to say that the app is one of the best designed and developed Android apps out of Nigeria to date.

In case you don’t know,  Afrinolly is a mobile phone-based application which allows you to stream African movies, music videos, comedy and get latest entertainment news and celebrity gossip and gist from your Android and Blackberry device.

The Afrinolly app was birthed after the Google Nigeria Day in May 2011 and within a few weeks the app was submitted for the Google Android Developer Challenge, and eventually became one of the finalists in the competition announced in July.

Since then, the developers sought to add more features and functionality to the app beyond what was originally submitted for the competition. Finally, the app was unveiled on August 26 at a media parley held in Lagos to a selected group of tech and entertainment bloggers.

The idea was for them to test the app for 10 days or so and provide feedback before the app is officially released to the public on the Blackberry App World and the Android Market.

Techloy got an opportunity to test the app on August 26, so after several days of playing around the mobile app, here’s our official review of the Afrinolly Android app. [The Afrinolly Blackberry app review will be published next week]

The AfriNolly Android App Review By Techloy

The first thing you’ll probably notice about this app is that it doesn’t look different from the screenshots we’ve seen previously published. That said, you’ll have thought that it would be a clone of movie-related apps such as that of IMDB, but it isn’t at all.

Size

The Afrinolly app is very fast and easy to download compared to other apps in its category. Its size is only 687KB, so depending on your mobile internet speed, you can download the app within a few seconds.

However, due to the heavy graphical content on the app, you might experience some delays with loading the app when you’re navigating from one menu to the other.

That said, the app developers did a very good job in compressing the app and its content to its current size of 687KB.

We’ll give the app a 7/10 for its size.

Design/Interface

Like we said earlier, the Afrinolly app is one of the best designed apps out there. Clothed with the flamboyant colour of yellow with a touch of black and grey colours, the app looks very attractive and sleek. Since we used the 7-inch Encipher ‘INYE’ tablet for our review, we didn’t bother about how the app would look on a small screen size.

The feature icons for Movies, Celebrities, News and Communities are user-friendly and aren’t misleading at all, so even though the text were removed, users can still know which icons they’re clicking on.

The app displays most viewed movie trailers on the home screen and allows you to flick through the list horizontally. A thumbnail of the movie posters are embedded on each movie so as to let you get a quick snapshot of the movie’s title and cast before clicking to watch the trailer.

When you click on any movie trailer, it gives you the option of opening the movie either on your device browser, Opera Mini browser or on Youtube, and when you choose an option it opens the movie link on Youtube, where you can click play to start watching.

One thing to note about watching movies via this app is that the video is already compressed since you’re viewing it on the mobile version of Youtube, thus you need not worry about how long it takes to load the page. However, we feel that the videos can be further compressed to allow for quicker and easy viewing.

The app also lets you find details about the movie including release date, genre and synopsis. It also features the movie’s actors/actresses, reviews and commentaries.

We’ll give the app a 9/10 for user interface design.

Content

One of the key features of this app is that it makes it easy to access local and relevant content as it relates to celebs. The app provides useful information including photos, mini bio, filmography, website and social media links on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn of Nollywood stars. That way, you can learn more about the actors and actresses behind the movies that you’ve watched.

Afrinolly app embraces user-generated content such as reviews and ratings, thus giving the average user the power to express his/her opinion about a particular movie or celeb. Before or after watching a movie trailer, you can find reviews posted by other users or simply post your own review. To post a review, you’ll need to become a member by signing up through Facebook Connect.

The app also gives you the latest news around entertainment and about celebrities. Although the news section is basically an RSS Feed, it provides relevant news from the popular entertainment websites and blogs such as BellaNaija and displays these as news headlines with a link that takes you to the various sites for the full gist of the story.

However, since some news sites on the app are not optimised for mobile viewing, visiting such links may be a pain on your device and may increase your data charges (i.e if you’re on a data plan) as pages would take longer to load, instead of faster if they were mobile-friendly.

That said, we’ll give the app an 8/10 for content.

Social

The app is socially savvy as it allows you to share celeb profile pages, movie trailers, etc with your friends via Facebook, Twitter and Gmail.

The app also includes links to websites and social media pages on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn of the celebrities. However, it doesn’t provide links to the social media pages and websites of the movies.

We’ll give the app a 7/10 for social features.

Functionality

The Afrinolly app is quite user-friendly and actually rocks its way on the Android platform which boasts a robust operating system.

However, the app lacks essential features such as a search functionality and a ‘back’ button to go back to previous pages or even ‘forward’ to next pages. Oh by the way, there’s a search icon on the top right corner,  but when you click on it, it feels dead.

Again, the app doesn’t allow you flip through pages either forward or backward, but allows you flick upwards and downwards.

That said, we’ll give the app a 5/10 based on functionality.

Other Features

Music videos and comedy – The app displays latest and popular music videos and allows you watch them on native browser or Opera Mini browser via Youtube. You can also watch comedy online via the same process.

Full length movies – The app also displays full length movies courtesy of NollywoodLove on Youtube such as ‘Sweet Potato’ which has already been viewed close to 2 million times on Youtube.

Up-coming movies - With this feature, you can look up up-coming movies that are yet to hit the cinema or yet to be released. When you click on any of these movies, it takes you to their movie trailers on Youtube.

Community – This feature is designed to enable entertainment enthusiasts to interact with each other, although we didn’t see any interaction between existing community members when we tested the app. Signing up to use the community is with your Facebook account, thus there are limits to what you can do in the community.

Final Thoughts

Simply put, the Afrinolly app is a game changer. I think the app is a must-have for any Nollywood fan and entertainment junkies. For one thing, the celebrity profiles on the Afrinolly app give users what IMDB.com gives movie lovers around the world.

Although most of the movies on the Afrinolly app are available on Youtube through the NollywoodLove page, it makes sense to have a dedicated mobile app that lets you stream these movies from one place and connects you with celebs and fans of these movies.

I’m guessing that Jason Njoku at NollywoodLove would have wished his company moved faster to build a mobile app for the movie content it currently controls on their Youtube page. I’m also wondering whether he’d be thinking of doing a mobile app of the same kind that would kill the Afrinolly app.

Whatever the case, the growth of the Nollywood movies industry has meant that entrepreneurs who key into that market early enough with content production and distribution either on the web, mobile or tablets would become hugely successful.

It would be interesting to see other innovative products and services that could come out from the entertainment industry.