Capption vs.
Bloomberg Connects
We thoroughly compared Capption with "the arts and culture app." Both deliver exhibit content to phones. The similarities end there.
At a glance
Assistive Technology
Capption
Capption was purpose-built to shatter known, real-world exhibit accessibility barriers during and after a physical museum visit. A single NFC tap — from any open app, no download required — builds a fast, casual bridge between a visitor's curiosity and the exhibit's context, serving low-vision, aging, socially anxious, and non-native speaking visitors in particular.
Digital Guide Platform
Bloomberg Connects
Bloomberg Connects positions itself as the world's universal digital guide to arts and culture. It turns museums into mobile apps — exhibition overviews, media, maps, 3D tours, and room-wide audio guides for 1,250+ institutions worldwide. Visitors download the Bloomberg Connects app to access content at any participating institution.
Different philosophies from the start
Bloomberg Connects puts the museum experience online, leaning into content fullness and richness to enhance an institution's storytelling. Its goal is to make the whole museum the whole virtual museum — gigabytes of exhibition overviews, maps, 3D tours, and audio guides for each participating institution.
Capption was purpose-built for something narrower and more immediate: removing the barriers that cause real, in-person visitors — aging, low-vision, non-native speaking, anxious — to leave exhibits without understanding them. Capption is a perception prosthesis, not a content repository.
Both platforms do ultimately deliver exhibit-specific content to visitors' phones. Due to this adjacency, we conducted a multi-week hybrid internal and external heuristic analysis of Bloomberg Connects' end-user experience prior to launching Capption. Here's what we found.
Bloomberg Connects in practice
What our multi-week analysis found
The weight problem
The Bloomberg Connects app itself is ~100MB. Each museum content package adds hundreds of megabytes to gigabytes on top of that — and you typically download it while standing at the museum entrance, competing for bandwidth with every other visitor on the same throttled WiFi. After visiting just three museums, Bloomberg Connects occupied 2.1GB on a single phone. Hundreds of Capptions may barely total 15MB.
Getting to exhibit content
Finding a specific exhibit means searching, scrolling, scanning a QR code, or entering a label number. Beginning with what's "on view" makes taxonomic sense for content authors — it doesn't make practical sense for visitors who just want to know about the thing in front of them. Each navigation step is a potential exit point for someone who was already uncertain whether the effort was worth it.
Stability and maintenance
Bloomberg Connects' iOS app was prone to crashing during our analysis. The Android app frequently failed to initialize, though it usually worked once it did. Several institutions had clearly implemented Bloomberg Connects once and stopped maintaining it — a compounding problem when museums rotate exhibitions frequently. Content administration that requires specialized knowledge produces degraded visitor experiences over time.
Accessibility — checkbox vs. functional
Bloomberg Connects claims built-in accessibility. In practice: there's no dark mode, font size adjustment is buried in app settings rather than the primary UI, audio titles are translated while the actual audio remains in English, and screen reader support is inconsistent. Translation covers 40 languages; Capption covers 125+. The gap between listed accessibility and functional accessibility targeting real visitor needs is wide.
No visit history
"What was that thing...?" Good luck. Bloomberg Connects doesn't maintain a visit history. To revisit a single exhibit, you'd need to re-download the entire museum content package — the same multi-hundred-megabyte download all over again. Bloomberg Connect also has a self-deleting cache, so the content you downloaded today may not be there tomorrow.
Why it's built this way
Bloomberg Connects is a React Native application — a framework that converts web code and website design thinking into mobile apps. This approach doesn't optimize for mobile hardware or native experience paradigms. That's why Bloomberg Connects is large, buggy, and essentially a website. Its architecture is the root cause of most of the experience challenges above, and we hope Bloomberg Philanthropies seize the opportunity to address it.
"So much install, so little result."
What actual users say
Bloomberg Connects earns a middling ~3★ with sharply mixed sentiment
What people appreciate
- Great information — deepened understanding of the art
- Lets you visit museums virtually without traveling
- Enhanced experience beyond the physical exhibits
- Helpful for people with poor memories
- A good replacement for the audio guide
"Deepened my understanding of the art."
What frustrates people
- Crashes too often
- Some institutions unmaintained — content doesn't match what's on view
- Can't expand body text; no in-app font size control
- Forced to download the entire content package
- Navigates unexpectedly back to institution selection
- Requires a data connection even after content has been downloaded
- Clunky interface; searching is the primary access mechanism
"So much install, so little result."
What Capption delivers that Bloomberg Connects doesn't
Bloomberg Connects serves content like a website. Capption was purpose-built to help visitors overcome the real barriers harming their experience:
- Entry speed. NFC gets visitors their content immediately, regardless of whatever other application they're using. No searching. No menus. No camera focus. One second.
- Zero searching. Search, filtering, focusing a camera, entering a label number, crashing — all of those things are indignities when you're trying to enjoy a museum. With a single tap, you activate the specific Capption you requested from any other open app.
- Genuine accessibility. Capption inherits all phone accessibility settings, then lets you tailor them further right there in the primary UI — not buried in settings. Then it remembers them. Capption also uses the world's most accessible typefaces.
- Rapid utility. Visitors will have finished reading — in their language and text format — before finding what they want in Bloomberg Connects.
- Comprehension without frustration. Capption is a perception prosthesis: a bridge to the context visitors need to complete their understanding and engage with the exhibit. Bloomberg Connects delivers content after you machete through entry barriers and performative accessibility, transferring your focus from the exhibit to your phone in the process.
- Exit speed. Close Capption, lock your phone, blacken the screen, or change apps — it doesn't matter. Capption doesn't crash or interrupt you. Tap again at any point to continue.
- Designed for reality. Capption is designed for the actual rhythm of a museum visit: scan, read, close, chase kids, discuss, don't open it for 20 minutes, take pictures, scan, respond to a notification, re-read content 10 days later. However your visit goes, Capption provides context in the format you need when you need it.
- Focused administration. Create, read, update, delete, label, archive, sort, and filter Capptions. That's it. No web-like layers of content or bulky asset management — designed specifically for occasional use, so museum staff never need to become experts. Neither should visitors.
- Bandwidth and storage conscientiousness. After visiting three museums, Bloomberg Connects occupied 2.1GB on a single phone. Hundreds of Capptions may barely total 15MB.
- History. Capption lets you re-access anything you've tapped without re-downloading a museum's worth of content. Bloomberg Connects has no visit history.
Pricing
Bloomberg Connects is free to institutions. Bloomberg Philanthropies funds the platform by donating development costs to enrolled nonprofits — a substantial tax strategy across 1,250+ institutions.
Capption costs money. Our pricing starts small and scales based on visitation — designed for institutional budgets that don't resolve. Talk to us about what that looks like for your institution.
How to decide
Bloomberg Connects helps institutions put their entirety — information, maps, programs, exhibitions, and exhibits — onto someone's phone. Capption is part of the in-person museum experience; Bloomberg Connects makes a museum into a mobile app. They're fundamentally different tools built for different purposes.
Capption is assistive technology designed to help institutions include and serve new and otherwise excluded audiences, enabling exhibit accessibility for 20 million visually-impaired people, 60 million seniors, and 52 million non-native speakers in the US alone. Bloomberg Connects builds virtual audiences. Choosing one, the other, or both depends on what an institution wants to achieve and how much they care about in-person accessibility.
The practical guidance
If your goal is to digitize your catalog and offer remote virtual tours, implement Bloomberg Connects. If you want to remove in-person barriers for disabled, elderly, or non-native speaking guests without interrupting your physical experience or adding workload to your exhibit rotation process, implement Capption. If you want both — implement both. We actively encourage it, and we're happy to help you think through how they complement each other.
See Capption in action
Try the same experience your visitors will have — scan a Capption NFC tag at a partner institution or explore our demo.