BeerAdvocate app wishlist

Just to have one!

 

I'm with many others on the mapping/nearby feature. I would also like for it to be easy to add a beer to the database like can be done on the website.
The scanning feature would work well with that, especially if it's not in the database.

 

So this could be nice in the app, a “in the fridge” tab or feature. Would be great for when friends are over and want to know what is ready to go and I can just hand them the tablet with the list

 

A seamless way to post photos...

An option to see what breweries/bars are located in my vicinity...

An app would be terrific....

 

I agree with all the votes for interactive mapping.

I use BA to help me choose beers to try, and also to help me find places for craft beer when I travel. Using the "Places" section of the website on my phone is just too clunky and time-consuming to do on the fly, so I find it's easier but still time-consuming to search for places from my laptop when I'm in an unfamiliar place. I've learned to set aside time to "get the lay of the beer-land" from my hotel room before I go out, or even from my home before I start on the trip. Having crisp "Places" search features and an interactive map would make that process much easier and allow more flexibility and spontaneity.

There is one improvement that I'd like to see on the website "Places" implementation, and also carried into the future mobile app. That is to see an indication of which places I've already reviewed when I get Places search results. This is already done for the beers you've reviewed from a brewery when you look at their list of beers. There should be similar mechanization for Places lists. Sometimes I want to go to a place I've previously enjoyed, other times I am determined to try something new. Either way, giving me that reminder in a list of Places would be useful.

Thanks for soliciting user inputs, Todd!

 

While we're on the subject of suggestions, I just had this thought for the first time in a while, and I know it's been suggested before and likely just not feasible, but some kind of option to extract all your ratings into a spreadsheet/CSV, with all fields in their appropriate columns as well as review text, would be awesome. Even if a one time fee or some such was necessary, I'd pay it. With how much I've dealt with infrastructure or systems failure, or even personal crashes at home, my paranoia around such things is always at an unhealthy high.

 

Agree with the suggestions about linking Untapped ratings to BA ratings so each check-in on Untapped would generate at least the star rating(s) on BA, if not the review comments as well. Also, retroactively migrating all Untapped beer ratings to BA would be nice but may be a huge, undoable task.

 

I don't know. I use the Untappd app because I find the website "clunky". That's not a problem with the BA mobile site as everything runs so smoothly.
I reckon that being able to upload pics directly from my mobile would make me happy. I would prefer that it would be implemented before any app comes out. Shrugs.

 

x20

 

I’d echo in this preference order:

1) Interactive mapping of places with easy, direct access to their Type (I.e., Brewery/Eatery), and Place and Beer ratings so I can quickly see and choose when I’m traveling through an area.

2) Scanning feature that takes me straight to a beer’s page/rating when I see a new or attractive-looking beer at a beer store.

3) Easy, direct photo upload.

Thanks for asking, and thanks to BA members for all the ideas!

 

Yep, +1 on the easy photo upload IF it doesn't break any BA budgets. Otherwise, I'm good.

 

Going to give you a pie-in-the-sky list. Not in order of desire, but more a flow of mind thing.

1. Direct photo upload or integration with a free photo hosting service.
2. The ability to scan text and have it attempt to find the beer on the site.
3. The ability to scan a menu and have it generate a list of links to those beers, or opens a new browser tab for each.
4. Integrate with Untappd to show both sites' ratings on a beer. As much as I wished the beers on Beeradvocate were as accounted for as they are on Untappd, the reality is what it is. Also, have Beer Advocate parse and take all the beers they don't have from untapped and generate a new basic entry on this website. More of a ghost version than what a proper entry looks like if someone reviews here, but better than nothing coming up. Then I could search for any beer here, and get better results from here when available, but also not dead end if the beer has not been entered.
5. Ability to show the Beer advocate reviews on a beer and also an additional page/tab/option to display the Untappd ratings that have more than 10 words as part of their review.
6. Ability to pick a beer and have it generate a heat map of the locations people have noted as the purchase location within x miles and back for x days.
7. Ability to pick a beer and have it generate a heat map of the locations people have noted as the restaurant/brewery consuming location within x miles and back for x days.
   
8. Ability to get beer recommendations based on picking a beer you really like and the program seeing what people who rated it highly also rated highly.
9. News feed of brewery news, particularly about beer events and special releases.
10. Ability to toggle on a rating based on style and not as a comparison to all other beers. e.g. if the highest-rated Dark Czech beers topped off around 4.3, it would adjust those to 5.0 and filter the same adjustment back through the style. I love IPAs, but I am sick of having to think a 4.7 is an amazing IPA, but a 4.0 lager is likely amazing as no one rates lagers as highly.

Some general feedback: The reviews and ratings on BA are vastly superior compared to what is mostly just a bunch of no-feedback ratings on Untappd. That being said, the ability to rate a beer on Untappd is so much easier and convenient that I simply do it to assist with remembering what I have already tried and liked. If BA could offer similar simplicity, I'd stop using Untappd (assuming I didn't need to enter 75% of the beers I am trying as they don't exist yet on BA). Assuming BA desires to stay completely separate from Untappd, a base-level must-have version would be one that is as easy as Untappd but features the strengths of BA.

• App-based and web-based
  • Two sections - Reviews and Forums
• Allow easy and simple check-ins as well as detailed check-ins.
  • For the check-ins, a person can go with simple just numbers and a brief optional comment version or a detailed version that starts with pre-generated sections to fill in the review using the common format people employ with Taste Smell Look etc AND the option to flip it to just text entry they format themselves.
• A link under each beer to auto-search the forums for any posts about the beer and/or brewery.
• Show BA detailed rating, BS detailed rating plus weighted no detail ratings, Untappd rating, and weighted rating of the two BA versions (see #10 above)
• Ability to include a direct upload photo with a review and in the forums. Untappd allows this and it appears instantly. The formatting and waiting requirements to post a beer image when a beer doesn't have one is extremely cumbersome.

I need to get to work, so there is that.

 

Good luck staying awake at work. You must have stayed up all night to write this post. Well thought out!

 

For tally purposes:
Photo upload ease - yes
Interactive mapping - yes
Barcode scanner - yes

 

Just being able to upload a beer photo without having to compress and crop to exact pixel size would be enough for me. Otherwise the current site works fine on a mobile device.

 

I always have a browser tab for BA open on my phone and have no problem accessing it as easily as any app. Regardless of the following comments I very much prefer the sortable database and cerebral BA to the badge game UnT. That said, despite the "merger," until BA can access the UnT database of beers, any new app for the purpose of looking up beers is a waste of time. The UnT database contains many times more beers than are in BA. I can't quantify the hundreds of times I've tried to look up a beer on BA and it's not there and I have to add it. Meanwhile, the same beer has scores if not hundreds of check-ins on UnT.
The map based place lookup referred to by many in this thread would be helpful (app or not). When traveling I have the most success searching Google maps for "craft beer." Just last night I looked at the BA city listings for a place I had visited and it wasn't there but a web search turned up a BA place record of it. Weird.
I echo the many comments regarding pic uploads.
All improvements are welcome.
Thanks Todd!

 

I believe you had an app when I first joined and I remember it being good?

I’d probably like it to be just like the website but with the ability to scan a beer.

Oh and I’d want all my stats carried over.

 

A cheat sheet for figuring out bottle/can dates. Some of them are obvious, many others are confusing as hell.