iPhone App Review: Justin.tv App

I have been waiting for this day for a long time. Justin.tv has finally released an iPhone app that incorporates everything a good video stream app needs. The layout is nice, clean and simple. It is very easy to watch the stream and chat at the same time. The quality is very nice on 3G and Wi-fi, although the true test is when I head back to college where I get the slower 2G, Edge. When testing on 2G, many streams took a long time to load. Most of those that did were unwatchable due to lag.

With this app, you can watch any channel on the website. However, you are only able to watch featured streams, your favorites, and streams you search for. You cannot discover streams using the search by category feature. Streams do not show up if they are offline either, so forget about joining a channel just to chat. For those chat moderators out there, there are no mod icons, so you are stuck with typing out /timeout and /ban, if they even work.

Before starting the app up on your iPhone homepage, you are greeted with a sleek steel-looking jtv icon. Upon startup, you are taken to the featured streams tab. This is very similar to the front page of Justin.tv where you can browse popular live streams.

Moving on to the right takes you to the favorites tab. This is just like your personal Justin.tv home page, where you can see if your favorite channels are streaming. Remember, they must be online in order to show up.

Moving on again, we have the search tab. You can search for any channel that is currently online. Be warned however, the match has to be pretty much exact for it to show up as a result. For example, "Over the gun" returned 0 hits, whereas "overthegun" returned OverTheGun's channel.

We'll ignore the info tab and move on to "more". There is not much here, except a place for you to sign in, change your channel language, and links that take you to Justin.tv's blog and twitter pages.

Even though the JTV app is not perfect, and has some minor flaws, I would highly recommend this app for anyone who is a big fan of justin.tv streams, and wants to watch them on the go. The app is free and does not take up a lot of space, so why not just get it?

Now if only Justin.tv made an update to allow streaming from your iPhone camera...


Justin.tv app (FREE, .8 MB) [v1.2]
Review Platform: iPhone 3GS White 16GB
Review Updated 4/20/10
Final Rating: 4.5/5



The opinions and views expressed in this review are of my own, and not those of Multiboxing.com, Justin.tv or their parent, affiliate, or subsidiary companies.