Pocket Beacon

I’ve tried using this app multiple times to be able to listen in on C4 and I’ve got to say this app is not my favorite. I’ve got a lot of complaints from the overwhelming design making it hard to find out where I’m trying to go to actual in app bugs. I want to mostly focus on the bugs, which I have two main issues of. The first issue being anytime I pause the app will not remember my speed settings. I watch on 1.25 speed and having to constantly reset this drives me up a wall. My second issue is how I’ll be watching an episode and it will cut back to the beginning. My phone will be on the other side of the room we’re sitting in my cupholder in my car. And it takes a second to buffer and boom we’re at the beginning of the episode, even if I was a couple hours in already. If this was a 15 to 20 minute video, I wouldn’t be so annoyed, but having to find what spot I was at in videos that are 3 to 5 hours While driving sometimes makes me wanna stop watching. I love CR and I know apps like these are possible to be done well but the app feels cheap, like I said it’s hard to find the shows I wanna watch and the homepage is super overwhelming. Not being able to select chapters while in vertical mode is also really annoying as well as the chapters not having time codes to when they are/how long they are. I wanna see this app be useful because I loved corridor Digital’s app and I used drop out a ton but trying to work beacon is the bane of my existence

I love the content and purpose of this app. I use it daily since subscribing to Beacon. But there are a lot of issues with the app performance overall that I have experienced on both my iPhone and iPad when trying to stream content. The main issue is I can never get through a single episode where either the picture freezes and the audio is still playing so I have to jump back and play it again or the entire video freezes and I cannot get it to play again until I completely close out of the application and open it again. One more item to point out is when using AirPlay to broadcast a video to my smart tv, if I were to pause the video for any reason using my iPhone or tv remote, after only 20 seconds or so it immediately jumps to a new video and begins playing that one instead of simply staying paused.

As far as content goes, this app has that. That was never going to be an issue for this platform. The problems I have had involve the delay in ability to stream live episodes. They release as on-demand and ad free, however they take about 6-10 minutes after the twitch streams start on the same night. As for playback features, the app suffers from the inability to fill/zoom/adjust screen size in any way, however, PiP mode works well. I have to same issue on other apps when listening at 1.5-2x speed where the playback feed will eventually lag and restart all the way back to the beginning of the playback speed initialization. This may be a software or app bug that needs an OS patch. The lack of integration with third party apps used for user verification when logging in is also suffering from poor user experience. When you are not using the app it will log you out and when you come back on it will take you to another app or browser to log in. This is tedious and not user friendly. Overall, the loading screens, while minimalistic, are rather boring and excessive. If there are going to be several loading screens between logging in, selecting content, and loading content episodes or features, maybe don’t have them take up the entire screen or page. It feels like looking at a blank screen for 45 seconds before even seeing the content you are trying to watch. Make it more interactive or interesting to look at, or even content suggestions.