Appless

You'd think a BBC director with politics and strategy at the heart of their cv would get 'the media' onside for change, well before implementation. James Purnell, Director of Radio and Education, has failed with Observer radio critic, Miranda Sawyer, writing today about the impending demise of the iPlayer Radio app.........

The app is to be wound down tomorrow, as – according to the BBC – the BBC Sounds app does everything that iPlayer Radio does and more. But it doesn’t, does it?

Sounds is driven by music (a mistake, I think, given that Spotify does everything Sounds does much better), and so doesn’t serve speech fans well at all. As an app, it’s not very instinctive. When you eventually find a show (the search function is bad), if you click on it, you get information instead of the show playing. The play arrow is confusingly far to the right, so it looks like you get information there. The download function is hard to locate, which is a mistake: not everyone streams all the time, because we can’t get the wifi and younger listeners want to download, to save their data. There’s no alarm function, so listeners can’t wake up to the radio. You can’t link to a show (say, to promote it, or recommend to a friend) before it’s actually gone out.

And – this is truly criminal, I think – the Sounds app only works with relatively recent operating systems. So if you have an iPhone 5, for instance, it won’t work at all. I understand that the BBC wants us all to use Sounds, but forcing people away from an app that they love is surely a huge mistake.