David Bowie Is ... app review – the freakiest show on your smartphone

Released on Bowie's birthday and narrated by Gary Oldman, the David Bowie Is ... app intends to bring you the gift of sound and vision - but falls a little short

You have to feel for anyone tasked with designing a David Bowie app, which launches on 8 January, his birthday, priced 7.99. Given the guy was a shape-shifting pop genius who worked 10 steps ahead of his peers, transformed our cultural landscape and even turned his own death into a piece of art, you're probably not going to get away with throwing up a few annotated pictures. Bowie fans want something that lives up to the icon's name. No pressure.

David Bowie Is " is an app based on the V&A's record-breaking 2013 exhibition of the same name, which toured the world before ending up at New York's Brooklyn Museum last year. The rather ambitious plan is not just to recreate the experience of going to the exhibition - which focused on the colourful, theatrical side of Bowie and drew a staggering 2m visitors - but to better it. As the creators put it, the app gains you access to all the exhibits: "Without the entire exhibition in the intimacy of your own environment, without glass barriers, vitrines or throngs of visitors." Who needs people when you've got a smartphone?