Cthru Music Player

Cthru’s main feature is a unique way to share music. Users can swap accounts in-app, transforming their entire app’s content and algorithm.

When another user’s account is selected, you see their stations, playlists, and favorites where yours would normally appear.

The social-first app lets you find public accounts and encourages users to invite friends to join.

Sharing content is sensitive for everyone. The app provides fine-grained privacy controls so users can choose exactly what they share.

Stations are the Cthru’s primary way to play music. They are endless play sessions powered by a custom-built algorithm based on your listening history and favorites.

Generated and user-created stations can be customized to choose the anchoring artists, eras, and popularity. They can be reordered or deleted to personalize the home screen.

The app is designed to indulge the senses. A robust color system adapts the entire apps palette based on the current track’s album art.

The adaptive colors use luminance thresholds to keep type clear and legible.

The player is designed around a dial the echos the original iPods novel design where spinning the dial makes it easy to precisely scrub through a track.

The app can be sampled without having to connect Apple Music or sign in.

Once Apple Music is connected through the one-tap flow, the system automatically builds stations from your Apple Music activity.

The user can continue using the app with all changes saved locally. When they perform an action that can be saved to their account, there’s a nudge to sign in.

The app finds playlists by curators you might like based on your listening history. You can also create your own playlists to share in Cthru without affecting Apple Music.

Cthru favorites are separate from Apple Music’s. They can be shared with other users and help drive the station algorithm.

Search provides clearly delineated categories that can be filtered down to your favorites.

Micro-interactions create a polished experience in every corner of the app.

Consistent layouts and styling are used across views for better memorability, while subtle cues distinguish different types of content.

I developed the design language and product solutions while building with AI-assisted coding.

I developed my own approach to agent architecture to make coding agents more consistent and improve their output quality. The system uses three types of docs depending on the need:

1. Source-of-truth docs: durable rules
2. Playbooks: reusable workflows
3. Trackers: short-term work streams