Review: TubeJunkies

Here’s a first of hopefully more reviews of iPhone applications, especially those developed here in Singapore. If you like me to review your app, do drop us an email.

TubeJunkies is a special RSS reader to make it easier for YouTube fans to keep track of their favourite videos in YouTube. Users can subscribe to video channels based on search text, youtube users, or video tags, and never miss any new videos uploaded.

Developed by Hon Cheng who had already did a few other popular apps for Singaporeans, TubeJunkies, as the name suggest, is an app to satisfy cravings for latest videos from Youtube. For example I have friends who subscribe to Taiwanese and Korean dramas that somehow find their way onto Youtube, just days after they were broadcasted.

Some of the features includes subscribing to video channels based on search texts, Youtube usernames and tags, marking viewed or not for the subscribed channels, just like a typical RSS reader.

Thanks to Hon Cheng, I was given a promo code to download his application for this review.

How it works?

The first screen you see when you load the app, is a list of all subscriptions you had made. On each subscription, you will also see the name of the subscription, may it be a user name, a tag or a search term and also the number of videos yet to be viewed.

When you click on individual subscription, it will show a list of the latest 25 videos for that subscription. When you click on any video, it will load up Youtube’s mobile version of that page. Somehow, certain videos are not available on the mobile version of Youtube. For example – this video from BBC. For those that can be watched, when you click it, it will launch the built-in Youtube video player. Simple as that.

So how do you add a subscription to TubeJunkies? You can add one by searching for a keyword, a channel by a user or a particular tag. That, is also the weak point of TubeJunkies.

The search feature is limited as it only shows the result based on what you typed. If you do a search on Youtube’s website, you will get a few suggested results based on the search term. For example, if I wanted to subscribe to the video channel from BBC, there are actually more than a dozen channels from BBC. BUT, when I do the search in TubeJunkies, when i keyed in BBC and search via User type, I am automatically subscribed to the main BBC channel. So for now, to get better results, you should do your search on the Youtube website on your desktop, then add those subscriptions in TubeJunkies.

Another point is the use of the blue arrow buttons on the right of the subscriptions. I would think that blue arrow indicates progressing to the video listings, but instead it refreshes the video subscription. A different icon might better reflect its refreshing function instead.

A Youtube player add-on app with potential

TubeJunkies does provide the missing function from Apple’s Youtube player – the ability to subscribe to videos channels and search results. If future updates come with better search functions, then TubeJunkies will certainly be a godsend that will satisfy the craving of these junkies!

The app is available now in the App Store at US$5.99 now.