DICE: Live Shows

Review by eFreeware

Buying a ticket to a gig has somehow become the hard part of a night out. You find a show, then spend the next twenty minutes comparing sellers, watching fees appear at checkout and wondering whether the seat you are buying is even real. DICE: Live Shows, from DICE FM, is built around the idea that this should take seconds rather than a browser tab and a half.

The app is free, carries no ads and offers no in-app purchases, which is an unusual combination for something whose whole job is selling you tickets. It has been on Google Play since August 2014 and has passed five million installs, with a 4.7 average from more than 95,000 ratings. Those numbers suggest a lot of people have made it their default way to go out.

What you get is a listings and ticketing app for concerts, club nights and festivals close to where you are. The pitch is less browsing and more deciding: a home feed that reflects your area, notifications when something relevant appears, and a checkout that shows the full price before you commit.

Finding a night out without the endless scrolling

The discovery side is the part most people will touch first. Events happening nearby appear in your home feed, and the app sends notifications when something in your area comes up. That combination suits anyone who would rather be told about a show than go looking for one, though it does mean the quality of your feed depends on how well the app reads your taste.

That reading comes from a few sources. You can connect Spotify so suggestions follow what you already listen to, and you can follow friends, artists and venues to shape what shows up. Following an artist is a fairly direct signal that you want to know when they play; following friends is a softer one, but it turns the feed into something closer to a shared calendar of plans.

The developer frames the aim as more music and less noise, and that is the right ambition for an app like this. A listings feed is only as good as its filtering, and the tools here are the filtering. If you already know exactly which venues and artists you care about, following them is the quickest way to make the app useful rather than merely busy.

What you pay, and how you get in

Pricing is where the app makes its clearest promise. The full price is shown upfront every time, with nothing added at checkout, and there are no resellers or inflated prices in the mix. Anyone who has watched a total climb between the seat map and the payment screen will understand why that matters. It is a straightforward promise, and it is the one the developer leans on hardest.

There is also a wait list for shows that have sold out, giving you a chance at tickets at face value rather than through a marked-up listing. That is a genuinely useful idea for popular nights, and it is the feature I would expect to matter most to people who go out often and miss out often.

Getting in is handled on the phone. You can pay with Google Pay or save a card in the app, and entry is by showing a QR code at the door rather than producing a PDF. Fewer steps between deciding to go and being inside is the whole point, and a code on your phone is about as short as that path gets.

Going out as a group activity

Plans are rarely solo, and the app treats them that way. Invite friends to a show and keep up with the events they plan to attend. Sharing is under your control, so you decide when your plans become visible to the people you follow.

Tickets can also be transferred between friends, which solves the familiar problem of one person buying for four and everyone else needing their own way in. Doing that inside the app, rather than by forwarding a screenshot that may or may not scan, is a small thing that removes a real source of friction on the night.

Beyond the ticket itself, the app includes artist merch drops and extras such as VIP access and meet-and-greets. These are add-ons to a night rather than reasons to open the app, but they fit the same pattern: everything connected to the evening handled in one place.

What setting it up involves

Getting started is light. You install the app, and the main optional step is connecting Spotify so that event suggestions can follow your listening. You can also follow friends, artists and venues from the outset, which is what shapes your feed over time.

Payments can be made with Google Pay or a card saved in the app, and entry needs your phone with you. That is the practical requirement to keep in mind: this is a phone-based ticketing system, and the QR code is how you get through the door.

The app was last updated in October 2026 with a small release covering bug fixes and general smoothing rather than new features. The developer notes that more is coming. For a service this established, that kind of quiet maintenance is what you would hope to see.

The crowd this suits

This is an app for people who go to shows regularly enough that finding them is a chore worth solving. If your calendar already has a few gigs and club nights in it, and you would like the next ones to arrive without effort, the feed-and-notifications model is doing exactly the job you need. The friend features add more if you usually go out in a group.

It is also a reasonable fit for anyone who has been burned by checkout fees or resale prices. Showing the full price upfront and offering a face-value wait list for sold-out events addresses that directly, and it is the part of the app I would point to first when explaining why someone might switch.

The content rating is Teen, and the app is free with no ads and no in-app purchases. What you spend is what you spend on tickets and any extras you choose, which keeps the app itself out of the way of the evening.

A ticketing app worth keeping on your phone

DICE: Live Shows does one job and does it in a way that removes most of the annoyances around going out. Discovery is personalized through Spotify and the people you follow, pricing is stated in full before you pay, entry is a QR code, and tickets move between friends without fuss. The wait list for sold-out shows is the standout idea, and the free, ad-free model means there is no cost to trying it.

The trade-off is that everything here depends on the app's listings in your area and on the venues and promoters it works with. The developer describes partnerships with artists, venues and promoters, and that network is what determines whether your feed is full or thin. Someone in a city with a busy live scene will get far more from it than someone who has to travel for every show.

If you go out often, or want to, this is an easy install. It is free, it has a strong rating behind it, and it is built for the specific moment between hearing about a show and being at it. That is a narrow brief, and the app sticks to it well.

What's new in version 4.268.0

This was a little release: some bug fixes, and tweaks to make your experience smoother. Keep an eye out for more soon.