App Review: AndroIRC

Some of you who were teenagers in the mid 90s when the Internet was just taking off, might remember this online chat phenomenon called Internet Relay Chat (IRC). These days you have WhatsApp, SnapChat and what-have-you, but back then, people actually got into public chatrooms and, well, chatted.

OK, I guess they still do, but IRC was one of the fore-runners for that kind of activity. And it's still going strong today by the looks of it.

AndroIRC splash screen

And now we have a nice little IRC client for Android, quaintly known as AndroIRC, created by Madalynn.

The team

The Premise

AndroIRC is basically just an IRC client put on mobile, with a typical mobile interface. Instead of clicking on stuff and typing on a physical keyboard, now you tap, swipe and use an on-screen keyboard.

On-screen keyboard

The Aesthetics

The default theme is cobalt blue and white, though you can change the colors via the settings. AndroIRC claims to be "fully customizable", but honestly, I don't even know what the hell that is supposed to mean. There's definitely going to be a limit as to what the user can change.

Font size change

Thankfully, one can change the text sizes. The default size is a little bit of a strain on my aging eyes.

All that said, the design is clean and simple enough, and facilitates the app's purpose as an IRC client. It's not beautiful, and doesn't need to be.

The Experience

Chatting on IRC is not a new experience. Thanks to the mobile revolution, chatting online while not bound to a desktop is also not a new experience. But the experience of doing IRC on mobile manages to be familiar and novel at the same time.

If you're used to a larger screen, AndroIRC may take some getting used to.

The Interface

Basically you have a console window that shows you system messages, any number of chatroom windows that opens whenever you join a room, and any number of windows displaying the conversations of any users you are chatting with.

The functions you're familiar with, and probably typed a lot back in those days, are working. Though some of them are less accessible than others. And using the "/" key, which is an absolute necessity if you're going to be typing commands, can be rather inconvenient on a mobile platform.

Select network

Log screen

Enter chatroom

Chat with user

If you were an IRC god in those days, using your keyboard like a pro, you may find yourself severely hampered by this one. Instead of an up/down button to scroll through your last typed message, you have to press the volume control. Copying/pasting is a little less convenient. At times, it can be a pain, but this is not something that is particular to AndroIRC. In fact, the little inconveniences should be the same for all mobile-based IRC clients.

What I liked

The nostalgia! Oh boy! Makes me feel like a teen again!

It's free!

They say having to IRC on such a tiny interface is a pain. Well, the extreme pain points come when you're chatting with multiple users, in multiple chatrooms, on multiple servers. I can certainly see that point. However, that's not my style at any rate, and I think having the interface restricting personal excesses, is not a bad thing per se.

What I didn't

Swiping left to pull out the list of users in a chatroom is not intuitive, and sometimes you end up swiping to a different chat or chatroom instead, which is plain annoying.

User list

When you're busy chatting with someone, a new chat initiated by anther user will immediately and rudely interrupt you, disrupting whatever you were typing. If you had typed a pretty long sentence, tough luck, chum. It's gone.

There's no function to ignore somebody by tapping on his or her nick.

No ignore function

Instead, you have to type out the command the old-fashioned way.

/ignore [nick]

Seriously?! Come on, it's the ignore function! How can you have a kick/kickban function but not an ignore function? How does that even make sense?

Speaking of missing shortcuts for commonly-used functions, AndroIRC does not appear to have a quick way to list channels either. Instead, you have to type this.

/list

Conclusion

Could have been great.

It's a nifty little app that does what it's supposed to. And for the most part, it's effective (not beautifully so, but still), but for a few niggling annoyances and a lack of some very basic features.

My Rating

7/10

/me likes this app!
T___T