Conclusion

As the music player genre continues to mature and grow, so does the options available to listeners. No matter the occassion, there’s an app (and oftentimes many apps) that are perfectly suited to the occassion, whether you’re working out, on a long commute, sitting down to actively listen to a record, or anything in between. When I first began taking notice of third-party music players back in 2014 with the launch of Cesium (now Cs Music), not only were there only a fraction of the players available today, I found it near impossible to discover them in the first place. While the fantastic community of passionate iOS developers are fully to thank for the growth the music player genre enjoyed over the past half decade, it’s my hope that this yearly showcase continues helps offset the App Store’s poor search and discovery capabilities and exposes you to players you may not have otherwise been aware of.

To put it lightly, 2021 was a wild ride, and it’s proving increasingly difficult to predict what the new year will bring. However, if this yearly assessment of the music player landscape has taught me anything, it’s that I know for certain what we can expect in 2022; the music player ecosystem will continue to thrive. Happy listening into 2022, everyone!

Addendum: Looking Towards The Future

To speak personally for a moment, this year’s showcase was difficult to complete. To my surprise, there were yet another crop of new apps this year, nearly doubling that of last year. While this is of course great news for the ecosystem, it put strain on the showcase’s current format; it simply doesn’t scale to meet the growing scope. I want more than anything to properly give the changes developers work hard on over the year the focus they deserve, but it’s getting to the point where that’s no longer feasible without sacrificing other aspects of the showcase. Additionally, this year in particular I felt my writing creep dangerously close to repetition, and now’s the time to pivot before that repetition becomes unavoidable. While it’s not clear to me yet what form the showcase will take next time, I nonetheless want to set expectations that for those reasons there will be changes. Thanks so much for understanding, and see you all next year.