Showtimes vs. Movies: Which is the Best Movie Showtime App?

Though the iPhone is one of the best mobile devices at allowing the largest range of applications, it’s not always the most organized desktop interface. The more applications you acquire, especially free ones, can end up cluttering up your entry screen even more. That is why in the flurry of free programs you need to pick the best ones, and only one of each kind. There are a variety of must-haves, including a weather program, scheduling program, and navigation program. But which free movie theater timetable program stands out?

Movies seems like the most obvious choice because it has such a strait forward title, which causes the user to think that possibly this is some type of superb “first-party” apple program. Movies allows you to search by zip code, the date up to two days away, and do this search by either film title or theater. It also gives you options to see box office results and information on titles that will be coming to theaters soon, both in wide and limited release. The problem is that on almost all of these options there are display glitches that leave stray HTML tags everywhere. This makes working with these options hard at best and impossible at worst.

The Showtimes application, which is also free, does a GPS search of your current location and does an immediate search of the theaters in the area. It gives you options to see the most popular films currently, their rating, and the most recently released. If you are trying to find a theater that is not in your current location there is an option for that and lets you search by address. It lets you see movies playing for several days past the current one, which is a great planning feature. One problem that it has is it often has problems getting a good enough signal for GPS navigation, and there is one advertisement on the program.

It is no question that in shear number of features and accessibility Showtimes is much better than Movies as an overall application. Showtimes uses GPS to find close theaters, has more informative options, shows movie times farther in advance, and has an easier theater search option. Most importantly it does not leave complicated HTML code everywhere. Showtimes is obviously the best choice, but it is important to remember that both of these programs fail to show local small theaters and only display information of the large theater chains. It may be true that you are never going to escape the need to check the local paper to see all of the show times in your city.