Tunerfish, which dubs itself "a social discovery engine for TV, movies, and online video," released version 1.0 of its Android app to the Market today.

The idea behind Tunerfish is similar to the one behind 4square, only if you replaced locations with TV shows, movies, and online videos. In order to use Tunerfish, you can create an account or log in using Facebook or Twitter. Once logged in, you can:

  • see what your friends are watching in real-time
  • see what they were watching in the past
  • check out trending shows, movies, and videos, i.e. what's being watched now by everyone
  • earn badges and awards
  • participate in discussions, view profiles
  • check in and share what you are watching on Tunerfish, Facebook, and Twitter

You can read more about Tunerfish here.

Developing The App, The Back Story

The Tunerfish team is comprised of a small group of awesome people, and the app was developed by 2 kick-ass Android developers. How do I know this? Here's the kicker - I am one of these 2 developers and have been working on the app for the past 3 months.

A web/backend programmer by trade, I've obviously been quite into Android for the last year and a half or so, and it was only natural to dive right into Android development at some point. Luckily, since everyone at work knows me as "the Android Police guy," I didn't have much trouble finding a project to work on.

I cried, I laughed, I didn't sleep till 6 a.m. at times, I cursed Google engineers for undocumented and outright confusing APIs, I praised them for their brilliance - Android development has been quite a mixed bag. Regarding fragmentation, I would argue with anyone who is saying it is not a problem on Android - it's just denial. Sure, there are methods of dealing with it, but in the end, you still have to test on a myriad of device configurations and OS versions, and that costs time - a lot of time. Nevertheless, I wouldn't have it any other way (*cough* iOS, WebOS, BB, Symbian *cough). The fact that the app was uploaded, submitted, and available on the Market all in the same 15 seconds, is just stunning. Google definitely did something very right here.

In the process, I've submitted a handful of bug reports to the Android core, and I'd like to give a shout-out to Tor Norbye of the Android tools team for his attention and quick fixes. It is quite amazing to be able to submit a bug report for Android tools and have a usable fix roll out within a week.

Another special thank you is reserved for Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky for creating the most useful site on the Internet after Google - StackOverflow.com. I owe many hours of my life (that would have otherwise been wasted) to the community behind Stack Overflow and specifically all the Android programmers taking their own time to answer other people's programming questions. Seriously, huge thank you!

Download

Excuse me for such a long story, but if there was ever the right time to share, it is now.

Without further ado, here is everything you need to download the Tunerfish app - just scan the QR code with Barcode Scanner or simply click on it if you're on your mobile device.

If you are looking for an AppBrain link to check out the official description and pictures, head over here.

[qr]com.tunerfish.tunerfish.ui[/qr]

Source: Tunerfish for Android