Quickflix begins to bridge its Android chasm

Android users often end up sighing dejectedly at the mention of Quickflix with the 10 year old Aussie company’s only presence on Google Play has been a third-party app which only provides a shortcut to the company’s mobile site intended for easier management of a customer’s queue.

Quickflix’s has been the closest thing Australia has to Netflix for some time. If you consume content digitally, you’ll have definitely run across their name, and its similarity in name to the overseas juggernaut doesn’t hurt. The company launched a streaming app for iOS around 18 months ago, but has been low-key on Android.

That’s not to say the company has been completely absent from the Android landscape, although their Android strategy thus far has been puzzzling. A Quickflix app has shipped with some Kogan products since late last year, and the company entered into an agreement with Samsung earlier this year, resulting in a Samsung-exclusive Quickflix app appearing on Samsung Apps a few months ago.

Not yet ready to Play with Google

We had assumed that the company’s next step would be to bring the app to Google Play – this would make their app and their service available to the widest possible Android audience, but it doesn’t seem like Quickflix is ready to take that plunge just yet. This week, their Android offering has evolved yet again as an official Quickflix app is now to everyone via Amazon’s new Australian Appstore.

Quickflix’s Steve Hogben explained to Ausdroid that Quickflix has been optimising their app for certain devices to take advantage of resources that are known quantities in those devices like memory and hardware acceleration.

The upshot of this seems to be that the Quickflix app on Amazon’s Appstore is really only meant to run on Amazon’s Kindle devices (Steve refers to the app as the ‘Kindle version’). As “version 1” of the app, it also isn’t quite at feature parity with the app on Samsung’s store (which is version 2), the main difference being lack of sell-through allowing customers to own recent TV series.

It’s unclear whether Quickflix sees the “Kindle app” and the “Samsung app” as separate apps or just different versions of the same app (their “Kogan app” seems to carry a different feature set as well), but an update to bring the functionality should come fairly quickly to the Amazon app.

Unfortunately, a side-effect of the app’s intended audience being Kindle devices is that it seems to crash on startup on several of the Ausdroid team’s shiny new Nexus 5s. As it was never really intended to run on these devices, it’s unknown when this might be addressed.

Future Playground?

There’s some good news, however – Steve also told us that Quickflix is changing their approach to Android. The company intends to launch in multiple app stores with better support for a wider range of devices in the future, although Google Play wasn’t mentioned specifically. Quickflix will also seek better engagement with the Android community by allowing users access to beta versions of the app and listening to feedback.

The timeframe for all these changes is currently unknown, but it sounds like Quickflix is finally starting to take Australia’s Android audience seriously.

Are you a Quickflix customer? Do you use one of the company’s Android apps? Let us know in the comments.