As established companies with deep pockets fill the App Store, small developers often struggle with entering a genre with existing competitors. For the app to succeed at all, it must be far more compelling the alternatives, often requiring competitive and standout pricing.

Snapseat, an app for finding showtimes and information about movies, is very similar to Fandango, which poses a question: what makes it different?

Functionality

The primary goal of Snapseat is to display relevant information about movies playing locally to you. Frankly, this is not a new take on Fandango – it’s a direct competitor. The point is to get you times, locations, and movie data as quickly and effortlessly as possible.

By scrolling through a list of currently playing movies, you’ll be able to tap on the title and read more details. All the important stuff is here: runtime, director, genre, rating, and even a (seemingly spoiler-free!) synopsis. Everything here is brief while remaining helpful, and you’ll likely be spending most of your time when using Snapseat on this page.

Further down comes the main event: locations and showtimes. Tapping on a movie theatre will show the movie times for that day, each their own interactive button that will prompt you to either share the movie through the iOS share sheet or book tickets. If you don’t like what you see for a particular theatre, I’ve found that there’s usually more than one listed.

Via MovieTickets.com, booking tickets through the app is a breeze. Although it’s not an all-in-one solution like Fandango, kicking you to Movie Tickets for your particular movie and theatre is enough to satisfy your needs.

Lastly, you’ll see user reactions pulled from trakt.tv. View these at your own risk, as they may contain spoilers; with that being said, it would seem that the users were good at avoiding them within their mini-reviews.

Within the main screen, tapping on the calendar icon at the bottom will display upcoming movies, with similar information as the films above. As one might expect, not all data is here – you’ll get the release date, but don’t count on seeing genres or even runtime.

For upcoming films, tapping “notify me” will send a push notification when the movie is shown in theatres. If you accidentally tell the app to remind you for a bad movie, re-tapping where the button was located will rescind the alert.

Aesthetics

Between smooth animations, an uncluttered interface, and the slick organization of information, Snapseat’s Rasmus Nielsen has designed a masterpiece. Once I started browsing in Snapseat, I immediately cringed at the thought of having to open Fandango for comparison again.

Through vertical scrolling, you’ll work your way through movies three at a time. Each features the movie poster, a background image, the movie’s title, times, and a rating. While this may sound cluttered, it’s done in a way that provides enough information without being too distracting. Coupled with the dark theme, it’s really easy on the eyes.

When tapping into a movie, the poster fades away while a play button appears for the trailer. The animation is solid and gives the movie a bit of context. Snapseat’s typographic choices are on point, too, as the color changes between movies while the font stays the same. Each section is divided by headers, so there’s a definitive break between bits of information. And, rather importantly, each movie is designed as a card – when you’re ready to move on to the next offering, swiping to the left will provide you with another option.

Issues

One of the biggest issues Snapseat has is the complete inability to reserve movies for any other day but the current one. Within the app description in the App Store, developer Mads Jensen has claimed that this, along with choosing the city for listings, is coming in a future update. Unfortunately, it’s a painful exclusion in the current version.

Additionally, the app uses The Movie Database, not the well-known Internet Movie Database (IMDb). While Snapseat does not include actors in the film, I would imagine this is more of the app’s choice rather than a lack of information from The Movie Database. It doesn’t seem that there is a significant difference in quality between IMDb and The Movie Database, but the distinction is worth noting.

For those with an iPad or Apple Watch, don’t expect to download Snapseat on those devices – it’s iPhone-only for now.

Wrap-Up

Snapseat, which is currently at version 1.0, is a surprisingly great product given its infancy. Out of the gate, it has proven itself as a worthy competitor to an established service like Fandango, even standing out as superior in many areas.

Even though it contains much of the same information as you can find online or through other apps, its price is compelling enough simply for its convenience and design. For those who are looking for something new or haven’t caught on to using an app for movie data, I can highly recommend Snapseat.

Snapseat can be found on the App Store for an introduction price of $0.99 (iPhone only).