Netflix App For Android Hits, But Only On Certain Phones

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A real backhanded chunk of news for you now, folks: if you’ve been waiting for Netflix to make its appearance on Android, but weren’t planning on buying an LG Revolution, you may yet be able to get Netflix on your Android…as long as your Android happens to be one of a certain set of phones.

The Netflix app will be arriving on the Samsung Nexus S, the HTC Incredible, the Nexus One (assuming anyone still has one of these as they mostly went developer), and both the Evo 4G and G2.

And from the look of things, it’s going to be a fully-functional Netflix app, too, meaning you won’t just be sorting your queue and wishing you could actually watch something on your phone. You’ll even be able to start watching on your phone, and then take over on your TV or your computer later on, and even manage your instant queue as well as your DVD queue.

This actually goes a long way toward explaining why the support for the Android Netflix app can best be described as “haphazard”. See, it takes a goodish amount of processor capability and the like to stream video, and while most people’s computers bought in the last five years can do the job and then some, cell phones aren’t so powerful. Thus, only certain phones have the stones, so to speak, to keep up with the hardware demands of a Netflix app.

Though interestingly enough, Netflix has followed that up by saying that, eventually, they’ll be able to put out a Netflix app that works with most every Android phone, not just the chosen few listed above. This also represents something of a backpedaling from earlier stances that it took certain grades of Qualcomm processor to tackle Netflix’s DRM, which makes me wonder just what they’ve got up their sleeve.

Further bad news, though, for Canadians: Even if you have one of those phones listed above, reports suggest you’re out of luck anyway. Sorry. But if you have iOS gear, you’ll be happy to discover that you can now view subtitles with it, so that’s a minor consolation.

Hopefully a wider release is coming soon, but how many of you don’t even care if you could get a Netflix app? Tell us what you think of this new development in the comments section.