Twitch: Live Streaming

Who is this app for?

Is this a way to find new streamers or a way to keep up with the ones you already watch? The answer decides whether you will like it, because it is very good at the second thing and unreliable at the first. Plenty of people run it as a companion to a bigger screen, and on those terms it holds up perfectly well.

Playback, chat and alerts

Streams start fast and the quality adapts sensibly to a weak connection, dropping resolution instead of stalling, with a manual override for anyone watching on a limited data plan. Chat is the surprise: readable on a phone and easy to type into, which matters because chat is half of what live streaming even is. Alerts for channels you follow are accurate and prompt, so you hear about a stream while it is still running, and for live content that is the whole difference between watching it and reading about it afterwards. Picture in picture keeps a stream going while you do something else, audio-only playback saves data when you only want the talk, and subscriptions, emotes and channel points all work from the phone, so supporting a streamer never means going to find a computer first.

The home feed keeps guessing wrong

Recommendations are the weak point and the reason the score is not higher. The home feed regularly offers categories you have never watched and streamers with nothing in common with the ones you follow, which is an odd thing for a platform sitting on this much behaviour of yours. Browsing the category list by hand works better than anything the app puts in front of you, and that is an unflattering sentence to be able to write about a discovery surface. Behind the feed sit two lesser annoyances. Scrubbing back through a recorded stream is less predictable than in other video apps, so finding the moment somebody told you about turns into a hunt. And the interface has thickened over successive updates until ordinary jobs, managing a subscription above all, take more taps than they warrant. For someone who already has a list of favourites, none of that gets in the way. For anybody hoping to be introduced to their next favourite, the app is not going to do the introducing.