The Bittunes Android application represents the first stage of the Bittunes project and the basic aspects of the ‘Independent Digital Music Market’ are all in place. You can scroll through the ‘Overall Top 100’ list of Artists, or search songs by genre, buy songs with Bitcoin and as more members buy those songs, users will earn royalties in percentages of Bitcoin.
Collaboration features at it’s core
There are many collaboration, communication and social features to the application with private messaging and an ‘offers and requests’ function to allow users to advertise or request services from each other.
Inbuilt deposits and earnings accounts
We are also at the moment duplicating the bitcoin Payment, Deposit and Transfer facility on the Bittunes website, to match the bitcoin handling features that are already in place on the Android Application. This will allow Artists and ordinary users to deposit funds easily via the web, either with their existing bitcoin wallet service, or of they do not have one we help them establish one with 3rd party Bitcoin vendors like Coinbase.
Music Industry integration
We have been working closely with a leading Music Industry business to integrate rights and royalties logic into the Bittunes platform to enable the service to comply with the legacy systems to create no barrier to entry for all Artists into the system. The immediate benefit for the platform and for its first users will be the integration of thousands of tracks by successful artists, guaranteeing ‘supply’ of content to help drive adoption of the platform. This will be occurring in the later half of 2014.
Why we developed on Android rather than Apple’s iOS
When we began the project, we made the decision to develop on Android because at that time Apple was not accepting Bitcoin related apps into their app store. Although this situation has changed somewhat recently in relation to Bitcoin apps, since Apple’s deal with Beats they have started removing many music related apps, so we feel we made the right decision.
With recent updates, the Bittunes app is now supported on 3200 different Android device sizes and resolutions…
However, developing for Android does necessarily involve having to support many more devices than developing for the iPhone. So, during the first half of 2014 while the business team have been working through issues with our music industry partners the technical and design team have been developing and testing the Android application to make sure that would be supported on as many device sizes and resolutions as possible.