A brief survey of android bartending applications

Ever have one of those days where everything goes wrong? Or one where everything goes right!  I prefer the latter but unfortunately, many days come closer to the first.   Like many people, I like to relieve some of the stress of the day with a drink (Note: I said relieve stress, not kill my liver).  But what to drink? 

I have my favorites but sometimes I am in the mood for something different.  That’s where my android phone comes into the picture.  It actually comes into the picture for a lot of things, but those are different articles.

A quick review of the android app market search results for ‘bartender’ gives 6 results.  Prices ranged from Free (woohoo) to $9.99.    For the purpose of this article I tried them all; the applications, NOT all the drinks.

I found that the price of the application made very little difference in its features or the number of drink recipes.  I had high hopes for the Bartender’s Bible ($9.99, Handmark) but it had what appeared to be the smallest selection.  The best of all of the ones that I tried was Drinktini ($0.99, eMbience Inc).  It had one of the options that I really like to see.  That is, you can tell it what you have on hand and it will filter the recipes for you.  This way, you aren’t looking thru many recipes only to see that it needs an obscure liqueur.  However, it only allows you to add 5 new ingredients to its standard 6 liquors.  I like to use WebTender online and this is the closest that I could find.  One of the features of 10001 Cocktails (Free, Red Droid Software) is that it can search the applications website.  This is especially convenient as they can add new drinks daily without needing any update to the app.  The other programs may have worked this way in the background but I was unable to tell.

  DrinkMakr ($0.99, mobimojo) had a good ‘Bartending 101’ primer and included photos.  Bartender (Free, Jon L) had a decent number of drinks and let you save favorites.  Lastly, Bartender Buddy ($0.99, Digital Scalability, Inc.) would let you select a single ingredient from a long list and provide the recipes that contained that ingredient.  At the bottom of the list of recipes from this list are facts about the selected ingredient.

In the end, which application you choose is up to you as they all have different features that may be different from what I look for in a drink recipe application. 
Enjoy your stress relief!  Even if you do not drink or only want to entertain, the above applications may help you.  The Android market also has plenty of games that can help to eliminate the stress of an absolutely hectic day.