I'm very pleased to announce that the 2016 version of my Where to Eat in London app is now available from the iTunes app store! Grab it here:
Where to Eat in London 2016
Anyone familiar with the 2015 version will know pretty much what to expect - 100 restaurants that I consider to be the very best in town, each with a review written specifically for the app. And if this all this is new to you, it won't be long before you're discovering new places and ticking off your 'visited' list with the best of them. It's very easy to use.
Such is the pace of change in the past 12 months that at least 20% of the entries are brand new for 2016. I'll leave you to discover which ones they are, but anyone following these pages probably won't be very surprised to see certain Kingsland Road chicken joints and Sri-Lankan Soho curry houses making an appearance.
And with the total number of restaurants being still just 100, that of course means there have been a few culled from the list. Most are simply closures; Zucca, Fino, Garufin, Koya, all decent restaurants that didn't make it through the maelstrom of activity that was London 2015. It's been a funny old year.
And there's still no Android version I'm afraid - at least, not yet. Complicated economic reasons but boiling down to the fact that the extra development costs for Android aren't worth it for the potential returns. But if the iOS version does well enough then the publishers will consider developing one - so watch this space.
Anyway I hope you enjoy it, and as ever, if you like it and find it useful, or even if you download it just for the reviews (plenty of reading material there for your £2.99, I'm sure you'll agree), please do leave a report on iTunes. It all helps.
Meantime, happy downloading and happy eating!
7 comments:
Congrats - though sadly I'll have to wait for the android version.
Might be worth running a kickstarter for it though I'd be astonished if you didn't make far more that you actually need for the development. Stretch goals can fund your extensive 'researching the next edition' budget...
Iäd join a Kickstarter for the Android version. Or a web version with a paid yearly membership.
Bah no Android version bah.
Also I spy an entry for Pitt Cue in a screenshot - the app knows it's currently shut, right?
Anon: Yes I did know about Pitt Cue but it's only moving locations, not shutting down, and as they're due to open in a couple of weeks again I thought I'd leave them in. You should notice they're listed near Liverpool Street now, not Soho.
Som Saa could have stayed in too but they couldn't tell me when they were opening again so I had to leave them out...
Hi Chris, I'm not trolling, this is a genuine query. How come with this app we have to buy it again, whereas the other Blue Crow Media apps (Craft Beer London, Coffee London etc.) are just updated periodically for free?
This isn't a complaint. It's a great app and well worth the small amount of money the app costs, but I'm just interested in the strategy of it all.
Anon: There are a few ways of doing things as you'll probably guess, but the reason we decided to bring out a new yearly edition instead of doing incremental updates is that things change so much in the restaurant world I'd have to keep rewriting the reviews more or less constantly. And so to save myself a nervous breakdown we decided to just do 100 new writeups every year, charge another £2.99 for them, and then have the 2015/2014 versions there for historical interest or reference. Having a completely new version of the app makes a nice clean break and means we can relaunch it and let people know about the entirely new content.
During 2016 if any restaurants close down or their contact details change then we will update the app with the new info. But incremental changes to a single app would just get lost I think (plus we run the risk of annoying people with constant updates as soon as I discover a new place).
One way of doing it is having a kind of membership system where people pay a subscription and have the app updated monthly. I'd like to do this eventually, but it's finding the resources and figuring out the logistics. Perhaps next year!
Thanks for explaining. If the membership does launch it's something I'd be interested in.
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