Best Apps to See What's On TV

Buddy TV has a beautiful user interface and some really great features. See your favorite channels, your favorite shows, certain types of TV shows, suggested shows, or ALL of the listings. If you like, you can pair your (free) BuddyTV account with Facebook and/or Netflix for more customization. If you own certain compatible devices, you can even use the app as a remote control. It doesn't get much better than this.

What’s on TV? HD is one of the few Universal apps, but thankfully the developers get nearly everything right. Sporting a good interface on both the iPhone and iPad, the ability to customize your channel list, push notifications, and an HDTV filter, What’s on TV? HD is great app for all iDevice owners interested in keeping track of what's on TV.

Next Episode is not a standard tv listings app, but it is one of the best TV show trackers for the iPhone. Users can add individual shows by searching for them or by utilizing the app's "recent" tab for shows that were seen on TV in the last few days. Once you've added a few favorites, Next Episode will organize your shows in the order in which they will appear next, and will even let you check off specific episodes that still need to be seen. Next Episode also recommends shows for you to watch based on what you've favorited. The app also provides a good deal of info for each series. Next Episode's good feature set combined with an easy to use interface make it a very nice app.

Focusing on individual TV shows like Next Episode, TV Show Tracker is a decent alternative for those looking for something a little different. Users put in as many shows as they want, and the app gives each show its own card with a general show description, when the next new episode is on, and the episode description, if any. The interface is definitely unique, and a good “schedule” organizes all the new episodes of your shows into an easy to read listing. The biggest issue with TV Show Tracker is that it only focuses on new episodes, meaning it won’t help you in locating reruns.

TV-Listings USA is a great, simple app that not only shows your provider’s listings, but also has dedicated Movies and Sports tabs that even allow users to filter both tabs by specific genres, making it easy to locate the movies and sports you like. Add in the option to take out channels from your listing that you don’t get (or don’t want to see) as well as a Ads Free in-app purchase option, and you have a good app for checking out what’s on TV. The only downside is that you can’t easily see future listings; you have to tap each individual channel to see what comes on a few hours later. It isn't the prettiest or the most feature-rich, but it is a very good, solid tv listings app.

TV Guide Mobile offers a clean UI, making it pretty easy to look up channels on your cable provider. A decent ‘favorites’ option means users can easily save both specific TV shows and channels, and then access only those favorites apart from the standard listing. A search option also lets you simply type in your show and find out next time it’s on. Overall, TV Guide Mobile is a good app that gets the job done.

Another great, feature-rich TV Show tracker, TV Forecast is a great app for people who know exactly what they want to watch and just need to find out when it's on. In addition to the requisite good UI, detailed episode information and full episode listings, TV Forecast also has a few neat moves up its sleeve, such as the ability to optionally correct show times to your time zone, and a reminder function that allows the App to email an episode reminder to yourself or someone else. See below for the iPad version.

i.TV is a little more robust than the other TV listings apps. Connect to Hulu, iTunes, IMDb, and Wikipedia. A ‘Watching’ tab also brings up an interesting chart showing what people are currently watching (calculating most likely from its website). Overall i.TV is a good app, but suffers a little bit from trying to be everything to everyone, while not being able to excel at any specific function. Still, if you're looking for a universal, feature-rich app to use on all of your iDevices, this is a good option.

LocateTV gets some credit for not bombarding the user with ads like most of the other apps. Unfortunately, LocateTV doesn’t have as much functionality as some of the other Apps, such as a favorites tab, a way to jump to a certain time, or really good interface. However, LocateTV does offer a good, simple way of viewing current channel listings with an option to manually edit the channel listings, as well as a decent search function.