BBC iPlayer Radio for Android launches

About time too. The BBC has announced this morning that it is bring its excellent iPlayer Radio app – which iPhone owners have had access too for a while now – to Android devices.

The player is now available in the Google Play store and will shortly be in the Amazon app store to enable owners of tablets like the Kindle Fire HD to download it.

The app is in many ways similar to its iPhone sibling and includes options like an alarm which lets you wake up with your favourite DJ or programme, a touch screen spinning dial to access stations and discover options which tell you what music is playing.

It also gives the user access to radio shows, podcasts and on-demand programmes (these are invariably from the past seven days).

The BBC also says that it has optimised the app for Android and made subtle amendments such as using the navigational paradigms of the Android platform rather than just aping the iOS journey.

For example on iOS some content is tucked beneath the ‘currently-playing content’ area on the screen, revealed by swiping upwards to show a ‘carousel’. However, on Android simply swiping horizontally will take you through all the content from the currently selected station.

Interestingly the BBC does admit there are some issues with Samsung firmware and that some owners of the Galaxy S3 device may not be able to stream some audio in the short term. This applies specifically to some Galaxy S3 devices on EE, Vodafone and Three and the BBC says it expects these networks to roll out a fix in the next month.

There’s a load more on a blog post here.