I remember a time when I was younger where I lived in a town where just three radio stations came in clearly. We could get a few more with fuzzy static breaking in every so often if we held the antenna just right… well, those days are over, because now, with Grab Radio, you can listen to the radio on your Android, and it includes so many stations that you could listen to a new radio station every day and not run out for over 80 years.
Developer’s Description:
Grab Radio lets the user listen to over 30,000 local and global Internet/FM stations on their Android Phone.
What makes this app different from other radio apps is the fact that you can ‘Grab’ a tune that’s playing on the radio by pressing the grab button you are taken directly to the Amazon store and to your music collection.
| Category | Score | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Does it Fulfill its Purpose? | 20 | As far as fulfilling its purpose, Grab Radio does a great job. At the end of my time with it, I listened to around half a dozen radio stations. Even the higher quality ones streamed just fine over a 3G Connection (though those of you with limited bandwidth may want to be careful of this feature). Grab Radio includes additional features such as built-in Shazam, the ability to save songs while listening to certain stations, the ability to stream podcasts, the ability to “grab” songs that you like (with links to Amazon, Facebook, Youtube, and other helpful places) and a nap timer for listening before bed. |
| Does it Look Good? | 15 | Grab Radio doesn’t look bad, but on my phone some of the icons seem squished together and rough. The radio selection and options screens were a bit messy, and the contact tab seemed a bit superfluous. |
| Does it Run Well? | 4 | This app has one major problem when it comes to performance- most of the radio stations don’t work. I tried around 40, and found around 5 that were functional. I would get error messages, the app would stop, and twice it completely crashed when I tried new stations, and the only way I could get it to start again was to go into the settings and force close the app. (It seems this is caused by the app including streams in its directory that aren’t supported by Android- some solutions would be to try a lower bitrate or pick another station.) Even when radio stations did work, they often displayed an error message first. Once they started working, everything was great, and everything else about the app wasn’t bad- it runs at almost 1.5MB with no ability to install to SD and requires ability to access your GPS location, access the internet, read your phone state, and access the SD card. |
| Is it Easy to Use? | 14 | Grab Radio isn’t particularly difficult to figure out, but currently a lot of the navigation is broken. Clicking a category only took me to the right place in the menu around a quarter of the time- more often, it took me somewhere halfway down the menu. Most of the icons on the main screen are grayed out on most stations, with no explanation as to why or how you could make them accessible (Some stations give the meta song information for the currently playing song- those are the only ones in which you can use the tag, grab, or more features, though using shazam provides some of that functionality). |
| Is This App Useful to Everybody? | 18 | Everyone who enjoys listening to either the radio or podcasts can enjoy the features that this app offers. Although navigating can be a bit clunky, saving radio stations as your favorite makes that a lot simpler. |
| Overall Score | 71 | Grab Radio does some things really well. The directory of stations is very expansive, and the ability to access podcasts is quite useful. Saving stations, nap timer, and built-in shazam make it very feature-filled. However, in its current state, finding working stations is difficult, and finding ones that use the developers’ tagging feature is even more difficult. That being said, if some of these issues get resolved, this one could one day be one of the best radio apps out there. |
Reviewed Version: 1.1
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