KICK - Live Streaming

Repulsive application. Every time I want to relax and watch a live stream, I’m seemingly hit with 10x the number of problems that I faced last session. Just to name a few things that are horribly engineered: 1) sign-in protocol: app won’t relay my confirmation codes to my email. App won’t relay password reset links to my email. When I try to sign up under same email, app says it’s been taken 2) Full-screen/minimized view dynamics: app will bug out when I turn my phone sideways to have landscape view and only display media on half my screen as if it were in minimized view. Chat will also “bug out” upon switching from landscape to minimized and vice versa 3) Botted engagement: Users can seemingly purchase fake view bots and artificially inflate view count with some small time streamers having 1 million views and counting. Chat messages can be purchased in aggregate, with streamers having THOUSANDS of different accounts spamming the same message. 4) AI generated engagement: Chats have AI generated messages that mimic user sentiment/engagement to artificially inflate message count. For example: 10 real accounts will send “message A”, then 100 fake accounts will then send the exact same message even if the content of the chat has NOTHING to do with the media.

When it comes to using this app as a viewer, there's this one really important thing that doesn't work right. You know those notifications you're supposed to get when the streamers you follow go live? Yeah, they're broken. Hopefully, they'll fix it in the next update or something. So, here's the deal: you go to your profile, click on "Notifications," and then there's this option called "Live: Receive a notification on your phone when a channel you follow goes live." Well, when you try to turn that feature on, it just doesn't work. The app keeps turning it off by itself. Now, I never know when my favorite streamer is live unless I take a wild guess. And guess what? Most of the time, I check and their stream is already over. It's so frustrating because this app could be great, but this super important feature just doesn’t seem to work.

“This app stands as a monument for a better future for content creators.” Being apart of the live streamer era for quite some time now and as the culture evolves as well as expands—its hard to make an honest living. Kick aims to be a platform that always keeps the creator at its heart. With better payouts, familiar design principles that captivate an audience, the proper tools necessary to grow your community, and now; A mobile app that stands as a monument for a better future for content creators a like. The UI on mobile is entirely user friendly. The ease to navigate between tabs at your fingertips as well as edit parameters on your channel allow for total control at the push of a button. With no harsh downtimes/bugs yet to be seen, consistency with blazing fast load times. Its hard to not love what kick offers. As its only the first day of the apps’ launch I am thoroughly impressed and cannot wait to see what other innovative features the team at Kick brings to its consumers!