Righteous dudes the world over are preparing to get mustachioed for Movember, the international fundraiser for men's health. The charity originally focused on raising awareness for prostate cancer, but has since spread to include male mental disorders. As a part of the movement, Movember has launched an app for Android where participants can keep track of their pledges, ping their various social networks for donations, check messages on their Mo Space wall, and snap photos of their stylish new facial accessory. The ladies can get involved as supporters, too.
The donations tab shows how many pledges you've collected, as well as how each country is doing. (Canada's in the lead currently, FYI.) The Mo Space lets you see what folks have posted to your wall, post your own update, and show off pictures of your hairy majesty. The only real downside here is that there's no option here to interact with your networks or teams, which are pretty significant social aspects of Movember. You also have to manually refresh to get the latest posts on the page.
The Request and Recruit tabs are little more than pop ups with links to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and e-mail to get friends participating. I would just as soon have those tabs subbed out for more useful Network and Team tabs, and put the recruitment options on a separate button at the top.
Finally, the Mo Stuff tab has a mish-mash of related content, including a short history of the event, the five key rules of Movember, and images of health cards outlining sound medical precautions in each decade of a man's life (unfortunately without any share options). There's a simple style guide showing nine kinds of mustaches to grow, though some additional grooming tips and tools would be nice to include. You can also view your Mo Tracker here, which catalogs your daily growth. If you need a reminder to take a picture, you can set a daily alarm to go off through the settings menu at a specific time.
Though the Movember app for Android is very bare-bones and lacking in sharpness and stability in many respects, it's still bound to be useful for tracking day-to-day growth. Also, as a charity, I'm not expecting them to be spending a lot of resources on their mobile apps. If there are some philanthropic developers out there that think they can do a better job, however, maybe they should drop the Movember crew a line. If you're getting involved in Movember, be sure to join up with the MO-bile Nations network and get your fundraising on with those of us at Android Central.
Now comes the tough part: convincing Jerry to shave everything today and start from scratch...
