Auxed: Music Recommendations

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Inspiration

I have a friend group with a similar taste in music and we sometimes share music with each other, but it's hard to find in the group chat (because we also talk regularly there) and easy to forget. I love sharing music with friends when I find something someone might like, it means something different from a 'recommendation' generated by an algorithm. Most of the time when I recommend something it comes with a memory or other reason why I send it to someone so I want to include a short message and a place to collect the recommendations. Also: when friends use different streaming services, just finding the song can take extra effort.

I built Auxed to give those recommendations a home.

What it does

Auxed is a music recommendation inbox for friends and small (private) groups. Share an Apple Music or Spotify link directly from your music app, add a personal note, and send it to friends.

Recommendations stay together (both received/sent), so you can easily find them. You can respond with an emoji or a written reaction, and supported cross-service matches help friends open music in their preferred service.

There are no public follower counts or passive listening updates. You choose what to share and how to respond.

Auxed Plus adds conveniences like sharing to multiple destinations and creating more groups, with a lifetime purchase powered by RevenueCat.

How we built it

I built two native apps: SwiftUI on iOS and Kotlin with Jetpack Compose on Android. Both connect to a shared Firebase backend for authentication, recommendation delivery, private groups, and notifications.

Sharing needed to feel like a natural part of discovering music, so I integrated the iOS Share Extension and Android Sharesheet. The original music link is always preserved. Artwork, metadata, and cross-service matches enrich the recommendation, while the original link remains available if those services fail.

RevenueCat handles purchases and entitlement state for Auxed Plus across both apps, which helps a lot for an app on those two platforms.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was making a simple action 'sending a song' reliable. Share extensions have short lifetimes, connections drop, and people switch accounts.

Cross-service matching introduced another challenge. The same song can appear on multiple releases, and a similar title does not guarantee the same recording. I took a conservative approach: offer a match when there is strong evidence, and keep the original link when there isn’t. This was probably the hardest part of the app.

Building two native apps also meant balancing consistency with platform conventions. The experience needed to feel like Auxed on both platforms while still feeling at home on each device.

I also started work on the iPhone Duo version of Auxed which is a whole new challenge in and of itself.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I’m proud of keeping Auxed focused. It would have been easy to keep adding social features, but the core experience remains personal: someone heard something and thought of you.

I’m also proud of the work beneath that simple interface: reliable sharing, private groups, thoughtful account boundaries, and native experiences on both platforms. Especially keeping everything private (server-side too) was a new challenge for me, but I'm proud to have a lot of extra checks in there.

The lifetime-pass presentation for Auxed Plus brings some personality to monetization (it looks like it prints a pass).

What we learned

I learned that much of the work in a small social app happens between screens: restoring a session, recovering an interrupted send, handling an invitation, or making sure account changes clear the right data. The whole backend is pretty new for me and it's a big challenge.

What's next for Auxed: Music Recommendations

My next priority is learning from people using Auxed with their friends: what makes sharing easy, what helps them return to recommendations, and where friction remains.

I’ll keep refining onboarding, improving cross-service matching, and polishing sharing across iOS and Android. I also plan to submit the iPhone Duo version hopefully on day one.

Built With

• firebase
• xcode