Swiss Radio Live
- swift
- 13-Apr-2020
During this global corona virus pandemic, like many, I have been stuck trying to create a daily routine. I have read that this can be useful and perhaps help to lift the spirit in a difficult time.
Listen to radio is not something that I started now (I always listen to radio when I work) but what changed is the channels I listen too. Lately I have been focusing almost entirely on public radios as the news updates are indeed very important.
Last year I designed one of my first mobile app (my.audio) build with flutter and working on both android and iOS.
I have recently noticed that with OS X Catalina you can now build an app for both iPhone, iPad and Mac OS in one go. This is a wonderful idea especially considering my now almost famous article on how electron apps were rejected by the Apple App Store.
So I was up for a challenge to build a new radio app in Swift that could work on both mobile and desktop. I have found a very good, open source base so I did customize it to my needs including my custom font and a selection of Swiss public radios.
And here is the result: Swissradio.live already published on record time (less than 24h in the Apple app store).
Now there are some serious advantages in using swift:
- <span style="font-size: 14pt;" class="">Possibility to publish on both mobile and desktop in one go </span>
- <span style="font-size: 14pt;">Access to a lot of native features e.g. having the audio to work on locked phone in flutter was a real pain (and I don't even remember how I managed to do that :) </span>
- <span style="font-size: 14pt;">Thanks to Apple Music API the app automatically shows the cover of the song playing.</span>
- <span style="font-size: 14pt;">All the coding and testing can be done in Xcode (way better than messing with a lot of stuff like I had to do in Electron..no comparison really)</span>
- <span style="font-size: 14pt;">Signing and submitting a package is very easy. </span>
The big cons is obviously that you leave out android (biggest mobile market) but to be fair the flutter audio package was a mess there anyway.
SwissRadio.live<span style="font-size: 14pt;"> includes only Swiss public radios and there are no ads, not on air or in the app. Some station like Radio Swiss Pop only have music non stop.</span>
The iOS app was approved very quickly so I am just waiting the approval for the Mac OS app.
