Why You Can Trust CNET Showyou for Android review: A must download for video junkies
Video junkies, casual viewers, and everyone in between will enjoy Showyou for its ability to aggregate interesting and popular content from around the Web.
Showyou for Android finds videos that are shared across a number of different social networks and aggregates them into a single feed. It makes it easy to not only watch content that your friends have posted, but also discover new sources of content that you might have missed otherwise. With so much content being posted across your networks every day, Showyou is a great tool for getting past the status updates and snarky tweets and right to the videos being circulated on the Web.
Showyou for Android
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Once you create a Showyou account, you'll be able to connect the app to your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, and Vimeo accounts. The more accounts you connect, the more content Showyou will have to sift through as it digs up videos. In addition, the app lets you follow other Showyou users whom you may not be following on Twitter, Facebook, or your other networks.
In the sliding menu on the left, you'll find Showyou's curated lists for categories like Entertainment, Comedy, News, Music, Tech, Sports, and more. These lists are made up of handpicked channels that fit the category. You can watch an entire category as a single feed or click through to view and follow the individual channels within. Going through these category lists is a great way to find new channels and discover content relevant to your interests.
Showyou's Home screen opens up to a single feed, with all of the videos shared by your friends on your connected social networks, as well as by those whom you follow within the Showyou app. You can switch views to see only popular videos, Twitter-sourced videos, or videos being shared just on Showyou. From the feed, you can also comment on, favorite, and share videos.
The great thing about Showyou is that it not only pulls content from several different sources, but also, it gives you a variety of ways to sift through and browse that content. This makes for a much different experience from, say, YouTube, which people typically use as a video search engine. In fact, swiping through Showyou feels a lot like flipping through channels on your television.
As a whole, the app's interface is cleanly designed and easy to navigate. The video feed sits front and center, with a sliding navigation menu on the left and a link to your profile on the right. Search and Refresh buttons sit on top for quick access. One thing worth mentioning is that the video player is not quite as straightforward. For instance, videos from YouTube and Vimeo play right within the Showyou app, but they offer different controls that are native to their respective platforms. Meanwhile, videos from Funny or Die can only be played from your browser, and not from within the app.
What Showyou is missing are a watch history and video queue. As of now, it's difficult to go back and find videos that you've already watched. And it would be nice to be able to create a playlist of videos for watching later.