Turns — Everyone Gets a Song, my new app for mixing Apple Music playlists
Hello,
I’m Barry, the developer for a new app called Turns. It’s a music app that connects to Apple Music and can take multiple playlists and combine them into a mix so everyone gets a song.
I got the idea for Turns going on a family road trip with our three-year-old daughter. I told her that we all got a turn to pick a song, that way everyone can listen to some of what they want to hear. I quickly found it difficult because my wife was asking me what I wanted as she was managing the queue, and it was tough to come up with songs off the top of my head. I was thinking it’d be neat if I could just pick my playlist, one of my wife’s, and my daughter’s and automatically have a song play from each. Since building it, I’ve found it handy even for personal listening when I want to pick a few playlists tailored to specific genres or moods and forget about picking songs!
The app is free to use with no ads, and allows you to make a mix from two playlists and replay your last couple mixes. I do have a one-time purchase for a Pro version for $6.99 that unlocks mixing an unlimited number of playlists, weighting how many songs play each turn from a playlist, Kids Mode to filter out explicit songs, and more!
I built the app with a couple of development decisions in mind — keep the app efficient and support a lot of devices. I’ve ensured the app is efficient with RAM usage, and only takes up 5.6MB storage when installed. As far as device support, it’s compatible back to iOS 15. I’m an iPod guy, and I wanted the app to run on the last iPod touch.
As far as a roadmap, I have a lot of what I wanted to implement for myself done. Here’s what I have planned:
- iPadOS support is in development now and should be ready in the next couple of weeks
- Support for other streaming services
- Most likely won’t be offering direct support for other streaming services, but hoping to at least be able to make playlists from other services easy to use in Turns
- Local music library support
App link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/turns-everyone-gets-a-song/id6779756400
I had a lot of fun building this app and using it myself so far and hope that some others will enjoy it too! Any feedback is welcome!