Here is a little page explaining what it was about!
Korus was a music social media app for human-centric discovery.
It was a side project / startup idea I developed in 2019. My brother Alex provided a lot of design inspo, and my brother Andrew gave killer feature suggestions.
The goal was to enable human-centred discovery, for those who believe music is best discovered and shared through friends.
It had some interesting technical components such as a bridge layer that reconciled Spotify & Apple Music. You could post on Spotify, and listen on Apple Music.
One of the more challenging items was creating the bridge layer not just in backend APIs, reconciling records, but at the mobile level as well. I needed to build a unified music SDK where you could call player.play(songId) and it would trigger the appropriate underlying APIs in Spotify or Apple Music for both iOS and Android. To post songs, I needed a unified SDK for things like "recently played" or "liked songs". Liking a song itself would also add the song to a "Korus - Liked" playlist on both music platforms. I used React Native (without Expo, originally), though I needed to get into the weeds of native iOS / Android code at times.
It started because my brother Andrew has great taste in music. I thought, even an app just to get quick access to his suggestions would be cool. And he uses Spotify, I'm on Apple Music. A bridge would be cool.
So, I made Andrew's tunes:
I built this whole thing MVP style. Actually before this, there wasn't even a play or like button or album image. It was just an ordered list of songs.
Then, I created a web interface to input songs Andrew likes and have them show up in the app via API.
Then, I added play functionality, then like, and so on.
Actually, for a while I didn't have authentication, because my brothers and I used the app, so we had an identity selector:
Honestly, it was a blast building this up step by step, incrementally adding and expanding and refactoring towards an actually usable Firebase-based mobile app with auth, logs, crash reporting, all that jazz.
I loved that I could dream up a new feature and then bring it to life. That's the beauty of software, to me.
I hope some people can appreciate how this app felt, I built it with care!
(Unmute and you can hear the song play)
RPReplay_Final1597811576.mov
This bill gates joke would make more sense if I wasn't on Google cloud
<-- i liked being lazy with my beta testers
For users that joined before i had the profile pictures feature, I seeded them with the weirdest profile pics I could find
I liked sprinkling little details like this
RPReplay_Final1597635991.mov
Thanks for learning about a project I made that is close to my heart!