Soor - First Ever 3rd Party Apple Music App
A music app is one of the most used app on anyone’s phone. For a majority of iOS users that’s the stock music app. Apple Music has a sizeable user base now, as of Nov 2018 it has grown to 56 million subscribers! Its last major redesign was back when iOS 10 launched, not a lot has changed design-wise since then.
Apple has always empowered and encouraged developers to challenge its own apps, to build them in their own vision, to try and push the boundaries of what UIKit can do. This is why you have 1000s of apps which show you how a better version of the weather, reminders, podcasts, camera, and so on can feel like. For a lot of us, 3rd party apps have completely replaced most of Apple’s stock apps.
The music app however, has had only a handful of takes and none of them fully supported Apple Music.
This one particular quote by Jim Dalrymple best reasons why I went out and made my own music app.
An interface that requires more taps to do simple tasks like “Love” a song or find a genre radio station. For the most part, the interface is more confusing now then it’s ever been. — The Loop
Almost 100% of apps that I make are to solve my own gripes with existing solutions. My main frustration with the stock app was music discovery and how every time I opened the app, it took way too many taps to discover new music.
While 2–3s to get to the discover tabs doesn’t sound much at first but over time it hampers you from trying out new music. 8/10 times I simply played whichever songs were recently added or opened up an existing playlist.
Design
I wanted to keep this simple and clutter-free, yet show as much content as possible. Soor uses a single page layout, no tabs nothing.
All local, trending and curated content is shown in a scrollable page. The discoverability factor is a lot better here because a user tends to naturally scroll down to see more (partly because of how we’re so used to interacting with timeline based apps) as opposed to explicitly switching over tabs and searching for new content.
The first thing you see on opening the app is trending music. All the data for trending music (hot/top/new releases) is provided by Apple’s iTunes RSS feed and is localised to your region. You can of course re-arrange the home sections so that music you recently added shows up at the top.
Fully Gesture-Driven Interface
Soor makes extensive use of gestures throughout the interface for commonly used actions. Some of these interactions have been designed from scratch and have never been seen before.
Drop-sheet
A drop sheet is shown whenever you long press any song. Tasks which took more than 10 seconds in the stock app are done within a couple of seconds in Soor, all in a single gesture.
An example showing adding a song to a playlist.
Universally Accessible Search
The search screen is easily accessible from any place in the app with a simple pull down gesture.
Pull to Reach
A unique mechanism to make single-handed use even easier. Just swipe down to traverse across buttons on top and initiate actions.
As phones keep getting taller, the action buttons on top have become difficult to reach for single hand use, this feature is sure to come in handy.
The gesture can also be used to trigger any actionable controls at the top, such as triggering a search bar to bring up the keyboard.
Well what if you are scrolled down, how do you trigger actions or dismiss views? Simply *force* pull-to-reach. You’ll be surprised how intuitive it can be. One caveat though, it requires a 3D touch-capable device. Sorry XR users.
Themes
If you are tired of waiting for the music app to get a dark theme then you’ll love this. Soor comes with 3 themes — Light, Dark and Black.
But it’s built from ground-up to be fully themable and an editor to allow users to theme every element of the app is in the works and will be released soon.
3rd Party Integrations
The beauty of a 3rd party app is that it opens up possibilities that the official app might never get, that is to integrate with other non-Apple services.
v1.0 comes with Musixmatch* integration which gives you access to millions of karaoke-style lyrics.
Last.fm support is in the works. If you use any other service and would like to see it integrated with Soor, please drop us an email at support@soor.app.
*Musixmatch integration is currently disabled due to licensing concerns from Apple. I’m working with Musixmatch to resolve this soon.
Download
App Store Link: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1439731526?mt=8
Pricing: $9.99 one time purchase
Official Website: https://soor.app
Twitter: https://twitter.com/soor_app
Developer: https://twitter.com/tanmays
Note: Soor requires an active Apple Music subscription to work. You may choose to signup for a free 3-month Apple Music trial from within the app.
There are a few API limitations that Apple has imposed on the MusicKit API. To know more visit this page.
