Great app. Some thoughts

[Opening-Button-8988]

Hello,

I've tested dozens of similar apps, such as Movie DB, The Movie DB, KineLog, CineLog (Play Store), CineLog (F-Droid), Cineaste, CineMax, Jetflix, Episodes, TMDB and TMDB via web.

Unfortunately, they all have problems. Here's what I need:

1. Save/favorite movies and shows, ideally with "watched", "rating", "start date", "finish date" properties.
2. Functional Import and Export feature to a common flexible format such as JSON or csv.
3. Use TMDB as a backend.
4. Be at least somewhat aesthetically pleasing, be able to view films/tv with images, and view actors pages.

Surprisingly, only MovieDB (this one) have all of these features. CineLog (F-Droid) has 1-3 but is lacking in the UI category, it looks ugly and outdated compared to the rest. Yet due to #24, the export to db function is broken and therefore I have no way to recover data. This is my number one complaint and it's preventing me from trusting the app because if I lose my data, I have no way to recover from it (I will have a JSON file only, but no way to import it). The moment this is fixed, I will start adding my favorite movies and shows.

MovieDB has an excellent featureset and is definitely the best I've used. Here are some thoughts.

1. I love that I can save actors/actresses.
2. I love that I don't need to be logged in.
3. I love that TMDB is the source.
4. I love that I can import (at least in theory...) and export in multiple formats, but I would like to export in more formats, and import in more formats too. For flexibility, I should be able to import using csv (that is, using formatting that is intuitive and not unnecessarily complicated, for reference check out CineLog (F-Droid), it exports to csv but the formatting is weird).
5. When logged in, distinguishing between offline and online features are a bit confusing. For example, I had to find out through testing that none of the online features such as favorites, watchlist, rated and lists save to json.
6. Sometimes when I want to scroll up/down, instead it movies to the left or right tab. This seems to be a common UX issue with a lot of apps. I think some tweaking is needed.
7. Search function doesn't always work as intended. I didn't bother making a bug report because it happens rarely and I can't reliably reproduce it.
8. I'd like to be able to select a year or a month without specifying the exact date (I select the first of the month or the first of a year if I'm unsure).
9. I'd like a decimal rating scale instead of integers. Most of my ratings are "7" and there's a big difference between 7 and 7.9 (though you could argue I need to use 6 and 8 more...)
10. The ability to create a personal text review would be great.
11. Option to download images.
12. Option to change the default images for saved movies/shows.
13. Export JSON + media
14. The name of this app should be changed to something unique. As you can see from my list above. If you continue using this name, it is unlikely to get much traction, if popularity encourages development at all this should be considered.

[WirelessAlien]

Thank you for the kind words and the feedbacks.

#24 was unexpected but I will change the method of database export, that will fix it. The feature improvement mentioned above will be added.

The name of this app should be changed to something unique. As you can see from my list above. If you continue using this name, it is unlikely to get much traction, if popularity encourages development at all this should be considered.

I was also thinking about that, it will be changed.

[Robio]

Glad to see someone else here excited to see an app that looks like it might get close to being a winner is a category where there are dozens of apps that all fall far short. I've tried dozens as well, and while I wish there were more apps that didn't use TMDB/Trakt (which are awful at chronology for any show that has episodes outside of their standard seasons, like "Futurama" and "Doctor Who"), this one is already better than most others burdened with these bad sources.

Having said that, I'll be making a post like this myself in the near future, with a long bullet list of suggestions and requests, and have already created five tickets for bugs and UI improvements.

[Opening-Button-8988]

This app uses TMDB. The app seems fine for the issues you mentioned. TMDB is better than IMDB, it has an open API and more privacy friendly. I'm unaware of any alternatives.

[Robio]

@Opening-Button-8988
TMDB/Trakt are pretty much the only game in town for this kind of API. I'm just hoping that if enough users complain about how badly they botch the play order of shows with important narrative "specials," that eventually they'll actually fix the problem.