Independent
Independent
BitDek is an iOS music player for people who own their music and care about how it sounds. No algorithms, no subscriptions. Just your library.
I took it from concept to the App Store: design, development, and launch. Years of leading design teams – systems thinking, taste, clear communication – turned out to be good preparation for working with AI.
BitDek
Designer & Developer
Independent / iOS App
Xcode, SwiftUI, Claude, Cursor
2024–2025
Live on App Store
The App Store has options. Most feel like engineering projects – the technical problem is solved, but the experience isn't.
BitDek supports lossless formats (FLAC, ALAC, WAV, AIFF), passes audio bit-perfect to external DACs, and gives your owned library a dedicated space. After years leading design teams, I wanted to prove that design skills would transfer well into building something end-to-end.
The process mirrored how I've worked on product teams – vision, data model, epics, phases – but with one key difference: instead of iterating in Figma and imagining how something would feel, I went straight to code. Design based on the real thing, not a simulation.
Nowhere was that more valuable than the visualizers.
Traditional design tools can't get a visualizer right – not because they're slow, but because a still image can't capture what a visualizer actually feels like in motion. The bars respond to audio, the perspective shifts, the stereo field moves.
I built a custom design tool inside the dev version of the app – a hidden settings panel, stripped out before shipping – that let me tune everything in real time:
The visualizers were the most visible output. The foundation they ran on was built first.
Before touching UI, I got the data model right. Structure determines what you can build, and years on product systems made that clear early.
The core model (tracks, albums, artists, playlists) was designed to support features that didn't exist yet:
Getting it right early made each of these straightforward.
With the foundation in place, the surface could be designed. A music player is something you live with, so BitDek ships with five themes, each with light and dark variants. The player background adapts to album artwork.
The library is organized around how people actually browse: by album, artist, genre, and playlist. The app remembers your preferences.
Details that matter to this audience:
Modern Orange
Midway through development, Apple launched iOS 26 with a new glass material throughout the OS. Many designers felt it was rushed – the legibility issues were real, particularly for text over dynamic backgrounds.
I had to develop a point of view. Ignoring glass entirely would make BitDek look dated on launch day. Adopting it without modification would compromise the readability that audiophiles – people who read track metadata, album details, and settings – depend on.
The approach: use glass selectively, then control it. I layered materials above and below the glass to manage contrast and maintain legibility. The result looks current without sacrificing readability.
With the app designed and built, getting it in front of people was its own design problem.
Shipping meant more than the app: a promotional website, App Store assets, and a pricing strategy.
For the website, I researched what the most successful independent apps in the store were doing, then settled on Astro – the right tool for a static site with built-in docs via Starlight. A brand voice I'd developed throughout the project gave AI a first pass at copy. Dev documentation I'd written during development fed directly into the consumer-facing docs. The whole site came together in under a week.
The App Store presentation got the same research-first treatment. Two video previews: one built around the visualizers to grab attention, one around the browsing experience.
BitDek is free up to 30 tracks, then a one-time purchase to unlock the full library. No subscription. You buy it once, it's yours.
Since launch, customer feedback has shaped the backlog – including CarPlay and Siri support.
This is a great music player for iOS for those of us who prefer to buy music rather than be at the mercy of the streaming services. There are no frills here or unnecessary features, just a solid player for my collection.
