Launch: Medley Music Player
Medley is a music player that looks like the pre-iOS 6 Music app.
The Backstory
A few weeks ago, I was dealing with some SwiftUI bugs in the iOS 16 beta.
The toolbar was buggy, so I replaced it with a custom view. The navigation bar was buggy, so I replaced it with another custom view.
Then it suddenly hit me: if I can replace the navigation bar and toolbar, I can probably build an iOS 6 style UI with SwiftUI. Then I added background images and text shadows to my custom views, and it just… worked.
Sidenote: SwiftUI and Customization
The system components are notoriously hard to customize in SwiftUI. Like you’d get 4 methods for customizing something, and if they don’t do what you want, that’s it. The navigation bar and toolbar are probably the hardest to customize because they’re not even Views in SwiftUI. (They get automatically generated when you use some modifiers.)
So if I can do without the navigation bar and toolbar, I should be able to build the rest of the iOS 6 style UI with relative ease.
Anyway
So I wanted to make an app that looks like a pre-iOS 7 app. Ideally, it should have a healthy mix of images and text in the UI to keep it interesting, it shouldn’t require a lot of text input because the flat keyboard will break the illusion, and it shouldn’t be a UITableView snooze-fest. In the end, I decided to make a music player. I call it Medley.
Medley is not a pixel-perfect re-creation of the Music app. For example, it uses San Francisco instead of Helvetica, and almost all the icons are SF Symbols. It doesn’t have Cover Flow because I’m not sure why Apple discontinued it after the patent suit.
There’s a Cover… Wall thingy, though.
You can play music from Apple Music if you’ve already added them to your music library. But Medley doesn’t support browsing the Apple Music catalog or adding songs from Apple Music into your library. I hope you’ll like it.
Medley Pricing
Medley is available for $2.99 on the App Store, with no subscriptions, no in-app purchases, no ads, and no tracking.
Currently, Medley is only available on the iPhone. I will consider making an iPad version if there’s enough interest.
Medley Privacy Policy
Medley does not collect, store, or transmit any personal information.
Medley Support
If you have any questions, email me or contact me on Mastodon.