The BBC, that bastion of Britishness, has launched two new iPhone apps for both news and football. Sadly for our UK cousins, they’re not actually available in Britain at all.

The BBC apps were originally due out in April, but were delayed following the Newspaper Publishers Association’s complaint, lodged with the BBC trust, that such a strategy would damage the “nascent market”. At the time, if you remember, there were a lot of questions being asked about how the BBC was spending its licence fee, and so the apps were put on ice.

Now, however, they’re being offered as an ad-supported service outside the UK, where complaints about the licence fee and the UK market don’t apply. And how lucky we fans of the BBC news service are- these applications are absolutely excellent.

Both the BBC News and Football apps are completely free, though they could easily charge a token fee for software of this quality. One of the major problems with news applications, and, indeed, large-scale news websites in general, is that they can be exceptionally difficult to navigate. Not so with the BBC.

On launching the news app, one is greeted with multiple rows of three columns each; to navigate, one either scrolls vertically (down the rows) to view further sections, or horizontally (swiping across the visible stories) to view further headlines within that section.

Even better, you can rotate your device to landscape orientation and, rather than simply giving more reading space, the entire UI alters to include a sub-headline, and the entire navigation switches to horizontal-only. I love this: if I feel overwhelmed by the amount on screen initially, I can use a more comfortable, cleaner view.

Speaking of clean views, tapping the screen once while viewing the story removes all UI elements, offering a beautifully clear reading experience.

The sheer amount of content on offer is staggering: all the BBC website’s sections appear to be hear,with options for several languages. There’s even a link to live streaming BBC radio.

The Football app is different, but equally good. It offer a home screen with a grid of options, which can be customised with favourite topics. It offers easy access to fixtures, results, blogs, etc, and will be very, very handy for the remainder of the World Cup. It also helpfully offers live updates during games. Beautiful.

The design is excellent too. It uses BBC’s red and yellow colours for the news and sport respectively, making it instantly recognisable and comfortable. It’s also nice and angular, in keeping with the rest of BBC’s digital UI, rather than the bog-standard faux-Apple design so prevalent in the app store.

All in all, this is quality work, as can be expected from the BBC. News organisations here could learn a lot from this- it blows away RTÉ‘s offering, and absolutely shames the disappointing showing from The Irish Times and Irish Independent. Then again, we should be used to being one-upped by British counterparts: just look at the incredible Guardian app, well worth the €4 price.

Posted by Dave Molloy in •Journalism •Tech

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