Written Android App Review
If there’s a lot of anything in the Android Market, there’s a lot of music Android apps. Pandora, Soundhoud, Shazam, Grooveshark—you can hardly spit without hitting some form of music streaming for Android. Occasionally though, a new face appears and starts to really make a splash. Just such an example (and a free one at that) is Ghosttown, by Ghosttown Music. Let’s checkout Ghosttown with my Android app review.
Functionality
Ghosttown for Android
What the Ghosttown Android app offers that puts it above many other similar music Android apps is its free streaming music. Yes, you heard that right. This app offers free, unlimited streaming of just about any band you can mention—or search for, that is. The app uses music available on YouTube to power its searches. Simply enter an artist into the query bar, and away Ghosttown goes, crawling through Google’s video player and stripping out music where it finds it. To avoid confusion, you aren’t getting videos here, but album-sorted tracks by your favorite artist for free. These tracks can be played anytime you want them, so long as you have a 3G, 4G or WiFi connection. You can even add tracks to playlists or keep a running tally of artists you’ve searched for recently.
On the whole Ghosttown performed admirably when I put it through a mini road trip around my area. It found almost every artist I bothered to look for (save the Narrative, though admittedly they’re more obscure) and had ample track offerings from each. Connectivity is still a severe problem: Ghosttown mostly works with a full connection, and hardly works at all without. However, when the app jams it goes. The good times are certainly worth the dodgy playback, but it can be a real struggle to keep the music playing at times.
Design
What puts Ghosttown above other apps like Grooveshark is its superior design. The app looks great, feels sturdy, and is incredibly easy to navigate. Finding new artists is immediate via the search bar, and the fact that tracks are grouped by album makes perusing music dirt-easy. The media player itself is stock but wholesome, offering skip, pause, slide-to-scroll, loop, repeat, and quality album art. The amount of time put into making this app look great goes a long way to masking its buggy playback, and the developers have done a real bang-up job putting Ghosttown together.
Overall Value
So at the end of the day, what’s the final verdict on Ghosttown? To cut it short, the app has the potential to be the next greatest music app for Android—hands down. It offers a quality (and free) service that all music fans will enjoy, not to mention a great interface. It’s still hampered by connectivity issues and the occasional sluggish performance, but when future updates hammer these out, Ghosttown will be the music streaming app to have.
Android Apps Review Details: Ghosttown Android app is free. This app requires Android 2.1 and up. You may download Ghosttown from the Android Market.
This Android app review, as well as the other Android app reviews for droid phones and droid tablets on this site, are brought to you by AndroidAppsReview.com.
