A new year, a new Radio Cult release!
v1.3.0 marks our first Radio Cult release since going all in. This release is a big milestone for us here at Radio Cult. We have worked hard to lay the foundations for everything else going forward.
We quickly realised that Radio Cult could never get the support it deserves while it was a side-project. The scope of the community radio world is so large, that we could never do it justice with just a few hours a week spent on the app. So we went all in.
The question then becomes — how do we support the app and ourselves going forward? We had heard from numerous users over the years that they would love some way to support the app — but how?
A few apps sell user data. We will never do that.
Other radio apps charge for removing ads. We don’t do ads and never will.
Some radio apps charge people for hours listened. The music coming through the station streams is all the hard work of the stations. We did nothing there, so why should we get a slice of the pie?
Other apps charge people for number of favourited stations. We don’t want that. We want people to support because they love the app and the mission.
We don’t want to compromise the user experience. We don’t want to annoy you into supporting us. We want people to support us for the things that we build.
With all that said, we are pleased to announce Radio Cult v1.3.0.
This new version was built with the future in mind. We have many more features planned for the year ahead. None of those features are possible with the current setup of the app. We needed a scalable way for you to keep getting the most out of Radio Cult.
We have been working hard to allow you to create accounts on the app. That way you can share your Radio Cult configuration — all your favourite stations and those beautiful UI settings — across all your devices where you use Radio Cult, be that phone, tablet or Mac (yes! You can download Radio Cult on your Mac!).
Most importantly, this is all free. Creating an account improves the experience and costs you nothing. You don’t even have to create an account if you don’t want to. We still let you do all the things you could do before.
If you are a previous user of the app, don’t worry. You can migrate all your settings to your new account with the new update.
We also implemented the Radio Cult Premium tier — our way of allowing you to support the app. The Radio Cult Premium tier gives you access to all the cool new features that going all in has given us time to build. For this release, we focused on our Shazam integration.
Integrating with Shazam lets you ID songs in the mix. No more wondering who made that beat, or frantically trying to google song lyrics before the next track comes in. Just press the Shazam button and we will handle identifying the song. You can then open the song in your favourite music app so you can listen again in the future.
And we have given the app a lick of paint. Who said your prettiest radio app couldn’t get even prettier?
As always, keep it locked.