Hey everyone! I’ve just released an update to the Android app QuickBeer. The new version brings a refreshed look and improvements to caching and the barcode scanner.
For those who aren’t familiar with QuickBeer: first released in 2012 for Nokia phones and later in 2014 for Android, QuickBeer is an app that supports most of the basic features such as ticking, scanning, and searching – but writing reviews is not supported. This omission is largely historical, as there have always been good alternatives that offer this functionality.
It’s a shame now, of course, as it looks like QuickBeer might be the only RateBeer app available for Android at the moment.
Another big caveat: the app uses the legacy API. For reasons I’m not privy to, the legacy API can only be used with old user accounts. If your account was created after the InBev changes, you’re out of luck. However, all the basic functionality such as searching and scanning works fine without logging in, too.
New version 4.1 is just out on Google Play! This update brings full support for reviews. You can now publish and edit reviews, save local (offline) drafts and check your old reviews.
Reviews can be written fully offline: if the app ever saw a given beer, it stays cached and you can always return back to it. This way a draft can be written outside of network coverage, and published later once back in range.
It would be great to get some feedback on whether reviewing works well and if the feature supports the workflows you folks have. I’m not exactly a prolific reviewer myself, so it would be nice to know if there’s something to improve. Either here in this thread or email to quickbeer@ztesch.fi.
Quick status update: login doesn’t work currently. I assume this is related to the other site issues yesterday. I’ll update once things are back on track.
As a positive spin, any user that had already logged in before this downtime is able to continue creating those review drafts thanks to the app’s offline-first approach
Hey Marko, thanks for chiming in. That would be very helpful.
I’m pretty sure I know what the problem is – the backend is blocking one of it’s own internal IP addresses. If you try to log in with the legacy API, you will soon get an email notification of a blocked attempt. The IP mentioned in the email is an Amazon AWS address.
I tried emailing Joe about this, but it may be that I don’t have a current email address.
So I was using a different really old android app (I think it was the official app?) for years and it gave me no problems…but then I went and switched to iphone like a doof. Is there any ios app at all?
