A new movie- and TV-tracking app, Binge, hailing from the indie developer behind other creative apps like the social app Mammoth, and AI news reader Bulletin, has a clever feature: It will warn you when the jump scares are coming.
To do so, the app takes advantage of Apple’s Live Activities — the feature that brings real-time notifications to your device’s Lock Screen and Dynamic Island. You’ve seen other apps that track ongoing events use the feature for tracking things like food deliveries, Uber arrivals, sports scores, and more. But Binge taps into the feature to let you know when the scary scenes are coming.
To use the feature, you tap on the clock icon on the jump scares detail page to start the live activity when you begin to watch the movie. You can also filter for only the “major” scares if you prefer.
The app enters a crowded space where other popular apps like Letterboxd, TV Time, JustWatch, Trakt, and others already have a sizable audience. However, Binge aims to differentiate itself by making use of Apple-specific features, like Live Activities and iCloud sync, as well as introducing a handful of features not all the other apps have, like the ability to add private notes, details about the post-credit scenes, awards breakdown timelines, episode ratings graphs, integrations with other tracking apps, and more.
According to developer Shihab Mehboob, the hope is to make Binge an all-in-one app for tracking movies, TV shows, collections, people (like actors), streamers, networks, and even production companies.
Like other tracking apps, you’ll find the usual details about the shows or movies you’re following, like the release date, description, trailers, cast and crew, reviews, runtime, genre, and other basics.
In addition to adding items to a watchlist or marking them as seen, you can also easily see where to watch the title in question — a handy feature at a time when content is seemingly always moving around between services. And you can track movies still in the theaters so you’ll remember to stream them later at home.
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Plus, Binge pulls in data from external sites, like the scores from Rotten Tomatoes, Letterboxd, IMDb, and Metacritic, and creates a guide for parents using IMDb information about the movie’s or show’s amount of violence, sexual content, frightening scenes, drug and alcohol use, profanity, and other factors.
Other features include the ability to rate movies and shows, sync with Trakt’s service, browse recommendations, view Academy Awards winners’ breakdowns, create custom collections, add tags to indicate you own a movie, add widgets to the Home and Lock Screen, use an “add to calendar” feature, and access a ton of in-app customization options.
The app is available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It’s free to download, but requires either a subscription or a one-time payment to unlock premium features, like the jump-scare warnings. Currently, subscriptions cost either $1.99 per month or $17.99 per year, or you can opt to pay a one-time fee of $49.99 to unlock the app’s premium features permanently.