If you like having your content aggregated into one central place, it’s likely you’ve used a service to curate everything for you. This saves you time and allows you to discover new content.
Briteli does just that. It’s an app designed to bring everything that interests you together. It offers both webpages and applications from the app store, and suggests new items based on what you’re currently looking at.
Briteli is pronounced as “brightly”, coming from “find apps that shine brightly”.
You can check out their website at brite.li
Setup
Surprisingly enough, you are not able to create an account. Surely this is a user-dependent app and you should have your preferences saved somewhere? Well, it turns out that it’s not really necessary, and I’ll explain why later on.
Settings wise, there are no settings. Text size, themes and any other adjustments are unavailable. When you look at the app size (190KB), it becomes clear that it’s basically a web page pulled into the app. This is by no means a bad thing, as the app can be updated anytime remotely and is kept bite-sized.
Overview
Briteli is split up into Collections. These Collections are really just topics with relevant content inside. Some Collections include “Photographers Toolkit”, “Cycling World” and “Astronomy and the Skies”. While it sounds like it covers a lot, there are less then twenty-five collections and I found some of them rather, arbitrary. At first I thought it was because the app is still starting up, but a comment from the website contradicted that:
[blockquote author=””]We plan to have less than 25 collections at any point in time based on current interest and trends. For example we may add a seasonal collection like ‘Football Fever’ during a soccer world cup.[/blockquote]
After even more use, I found it was OK with a small amount of collections that covered most of the spectrum, although everyone will probably have a topic that they wish was included anyway.
From these Collections, you can further sieve through apps or web content. It is, however, more focused on apps from the Play Store. This is nice as it allows you to discover decent content without being forced-fed popular apps that have been dominating the top ranks in the Play Store. I personally found and downloaded some apps that interested me. The developers also said that they would be adding in more web content shortly, followed by curated products.
Moving on to the actual app, it feels a bit empty. Think of it as a blank page with a few icons slapped onto it. It’ll be nice to see something more solid with settings as well.
Regarding the no account, I really don’t think that an account is necessary. For starters, Briteli doesn’t actually give you personalized feedback. Think of it as an index of content that you can browse through. Delete the app and re-install it, or access the website version and you end up at the same place. It’s effectively saying “They clicked on “Photography”, bring up the index of app webpages and apps that we put in”.
The app was smooth and efficient for the most part.
What we liked:
- Small app size
- Easy and clean UI
- Most major categories available
And not so much…
- The UI was too clean
- Limited, pre-set content
You should think of Briteli as an index. An index full of content that enables you to find the best things for you. It doesn’t adjust to you and your taste, but rather offer a category that you like. Briteli has the potential to become a really useful and great app for everyone.
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