I started building a radio app

I started writing a radio app following the tutorial on making a radio app in Flutter that I recently published. I was inspired to make one as I wanted to publish a radio app for iOS and Android devices.

Although still in its early stages, I am planning to release this soon to both App Store and Google Play stores.

Current features

At the time of writing (4th April, 2020), the radio app is at least able to play an online radio station. You can also choose which country to get stations from and bookmark them.

I have used the most basic and vanilla design I can think just so I can push more features early on. No fancy animations yet!


Radio playthrough

Here are some of the features that are already in the app worth mentioning:

  • Works on both iOS and Android
  • Can play radio station on the background (even when the phone is locked)
  • Can play / pause radio from the lock screen
  • Bookmark a radio station

Challenges

I found out that the simple things are the ones difficult to implement. It took me a while to fix simple issues just to make the experience of using the app better, even if they seem very easy to do.


Features

Things like consistency between parts of the screens in the app for example. Pressing the heart button in the media player should update the favourites screen. At the same time, if I remove the station in the favourites screen, the heart button in the media player should be updated too.

Another example is showing screens in between stages of the app. The app should show important information such as telling the user that there are no stations saved (instead of just showing a blank canvas). Or letting the user know that the app is still getting the list of radio stations by showing a loading spinner.

Features to be added soon

The app still needs a lot of polishing and updates before I publish it. These are some of the features I might add before I release the app to the public

  • Make the UI more beautiful
  • Add simple animations
  • Add a screen to show the radio information
  • Get stations by genre (news, rock, country, etc.)

Conclusion

That is it for the update! Writing this app has been both a joy and a pain in the butt, but (double pun) I will still continue and finish this up for everyone to use.