Apps are everywhere these days; we have them on our phones, our tablets and PCs and now even on our games consoles as well. Varying from the useful to the unnecessary, there's virtually an app for pretty much anything you could want. With the exception of phones and other portable devices, apps are mostly designed to offer greater functionality than alternative means and are, in theory, just simplified versions of longer processes. Take news apps, for example; a news app on a phone or tablet provides compressed versions of the online pages on which players would otherwise have to digest their content. The app offers better mobile stability and saves time and data for the user. For a games console the idea is very similar; readers and shortcuts are implemented in apps to offer better functionality than user inputs would be. While it's not entirely necessary for something like a PlayStation to offer news reading apps, it would be much better if the Sony's console offered better, more useful apps to players. Checking BBC News on a PS4 may have been useful once or twice when a phone or tablet was out of immediate reach, but apart from that it's just a frivolous inclusion. Streaming services like iPlayer and Netflix are far more useful, but the option to have similar services like YouTube to enhance the sharing functions of the console would be even better still.
Gareth is 28 years old and lives in Cardiff. Interests include film, TV and an unhealthy amount of Spider-Man comics and Killers songs. Expect constant references to the latter two at all times.
Follow on twitter @GJCartwright.
