New Android Apps: Coffee Fiends, Take Note: Official Starbucks App Is Here - It's Like My Coffee Card, Except Prettier. And Buggier

For millions of coffee drinkers, Starbucks is a sort of a daily Mecca - they can't imagine skipping even a day, and spending over $100 a month on liquid caffeinated pleasures is pretty much business as usual. Because of that, unofficial Starbucks apps that replace Starbuck's own Starbucks Cards on mobile devices quickly gained popularity.
If you've followed the history of the most popular one of them - the 4.7-star Starbucks Card Widget, you may have seen that Starbucks actually C&D'ed them back in February for using the brand name, after which the app got reborn as My Coffee Card and was most recently featured as Amazon Appstore's free app of the day.
After C&Ding Starbucks Card Widget, Starbucks finally decided that Android claimed enough coffee drinkers to actually develop its own official app, which it finally released to the public earlier today. Without a doubt, the app, simply named Starbucks, is prettier than its unofficial competitors and brings the features you would expect - managing, reloading, and using your Starbucks card, transaction history, reward tracking, and the nearby mobile payment-enabled coffee shop locator.
Unlike My Coffee Card, however, the official Starbucks app only supports Android 2.1+ (as opposed to 1.6+), occupies almost 9MB of space (as opposed to less than 300KB) without Apps2SD support, and, based on initial feedback, is quite a bit buggier. We'll give it a few weeks to work out the kinks - after all, nothing is perfect straight from the start.
Grab the free app from the Market by using the widget below.