Mustafa Can

Mustafa Can

Solo dev, 20+ years. Building Airtune.

About

I've been building software for over twenty years, most of it on other people's products. Airtune is what I do with my own — a free internet radio app for web, iOS and Android, built end to end by one person. 37,000+ live stations, no ads, no account required. The part I find most interesting isn't the player, though — it's the data underneath it. Airtune reads now-playing metadata straight off the streams and publishes a daily chart for 191 countries: what a country is actually playing today, not what a label says is popular. Happy to talk about ICY and HLS metadata, geo-blocked streams, keeping tens of thousands of stations alive, or shipping one product across web, iOS, Android, CarPlay and Android Auto without a team.

Forums

10h ago

How many platforms is too many for one developer?

I ship one app to seven surfaces on my own: web, iOS, Android, CarPlay, Android Auto, Fire TV and Alexa. I did not plan that. Each one looked like a small addition to something that already worked, and each one turned out to have its own review queue, its own release cadence and its own way of breaking quietly.

Three things I did not price in. The first is that a platform you add is a platform you keep testing forever, and the failures are invisible from your desk. Both my mobile apps were locked to portrait, which meant they were phone apps pretending to be tablet apps for months. I only found out when I finally ran them on a tablet. Nothing was broken, nothing was reported, they were just quietly bad on a whole class of device.

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