Swiss Radio Live
Määntig,13 April, 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:

  1. Possibility to publish on both mobile and desktop in one go 

  2. 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 :) 

  3. Thanks to Apple Music API the app automatically shows the cover of the song playing.

  4. 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)

  5. Signing and submitting a package is very easy. 

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 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.

The iOS app was approved very quickly so I am just waiting the approval for the Mac OS app. 

computer back home