Review: 9gag
Score:
72%
If the internet is good for one thing, it's good for humour. There are countless sites out there, all with their own mix of humour. 9gag has been around for five years, racks up over a billion page views a month, and is generally seen by many as one of the drivers of many popular 'memes'. And now you can browse it through a new Windows Phone app by Rudy Huyn.
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Not to be confused with 6tag (an unofficial Windows Phone client for Instagram), 9gag is a social network that looks to collect fun clips and images from its users and aggregate them out to others. Think Facebook, but instead of sharing status updates and a love for Nike trainers, 9gag will promote gifs, slogans, and fun taglines... and cats.
Lots of cats.
9gag on Windows Phone is an unofficial client developed by Rudy Huyn, who's becoming rather a dab hand at building clients for services on Windows Phone (for example, his Wikipedia client).
So, opening the app you get a live tile styled view to start with, and the opening tiles let you get straight to the content on the network. While it's not completely unexpected, the fact that you don't have to sign into the 9gag network to look at the content is welcome.
'Hot' and 'Trending' will take you into the viewing section of the application, which lets you look through the popular content of the moment. The viewer part of the app works in the Windows Phone style, allowing you to move between images with a swipe of your fingers, zoom in with the pinch action, and scroll around the image in the same manner as the photo gallery.
This isn't the built in Windows Phone media viewer though, even though it handles like it, as witnessed by the support for animated gifs. But it feels like it, and that's an important consideration.
Tucked along the bottom of the screen are the network specific actions, such as the heart to vote on the image (which is a similar principle to the like button in Facebook); read the comments that have been made about the images; and share the image on your own social networks outside of 9gag.
Moving back to the home screen, you also have your profile options, which lists your likes and posts.
It's probably best to point out here that 9gag can upload images to the service, but it can't help you create them. If you're going to be doing a lot of creating on your phone, you'll want to pair up 9gag with an 'artistic' app such as MemeHub which can help you create the images on your phone using popular meme images, or pictures you've taken while out and about.
There's some nice touches in the settings as well which shows the thought that has been put into this application. Having a 'safe' mode in terms of filtering out NSFW images is a good choice, and you can tweak the actions and UI available to you in the gallery mode.
I also love the 'kids corner' settings that will limit the app's functionality if it is launched from the Kids Corner feature of Windows Phone - turning off access to the settings and locking the app to safe mode are two highlights that I would love to see in more social network applications.
Competently coded, there's very little in the app that is functionally broken, doing the wrong thing, or simply forgotten, but that doesn't mean 9gag is going to rack up millions of downloads. You have to remember this is a specialist application. Unlike a client for Twitter or Facebook, it's not going to be to everyone's taste (and the humour is rather broad as well). But for people in the community it's a vital application - not having 'their' network available as an app on a smartphone platform can be a deal-breaker. This is one area where the lower number of apps plays out badly for Windows Phone. 9gag is never going to be on any Top Ten lists of apps, but without it many people will simply ignore Windows Phone when they are presented with it in-store.
Until 9gag comes along and develops an official client, Rudy Huyn's solution is the one to go for. And arguably it would be far easier for 9gag to hand Huyn a cheque and make this the official app.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at