A dev built an iOS app to clean up messy Apple Music libraries. But the real story is how Spotify's brutal API limits are killing indie hackers.
If you've been using Apple Music for years, chances are your library looks like a chaotic legacy codebase left behind by five generations of outsourced devs. One indie hacker finally got fed up with the spaghetti and built an app to refactor it.
Currently floating around on Product Hunt (with a solid 140+ upvotes) is an iOS app called Song Sweeper. The maker's pitch is wonderfully straightforward: he built it out of pure personal frustration.
Apple Music is great at letting you hoarding tracks, but over time, your library turns into a dumpster fire. You get duplicates. You get the same album split into three different editions (original, deluxe, and that weird live version). You have tracks you saved in 2014 that you wouldn't be caught dead listening to today.
The dev searched for an existing tool, found nothing that didn't suck, and decided to code it himself. Song Sweeper is a native iPhone app that hunts down duplicates, merges split albums, highlights your neglected tracks for deletion, and favorites your heavy-rotation songs to unf*ck Apple's recommendation algorithm.
The Product Hunt comment section is always a fun place to spot devs reverse-engineering a product in their heads. Here are the main takeaways:
1. The "Under the Hood" Question One user immediately asked how the app detects duplicates: "Are you using audio fingerprinting or metadata matching?" The dev's response: "I use metadata for matching." It sounds simple, but honestly, it's a smart MVP move. Throwing heavy audio fingerprinting algorithms into a V1 mobile app is a great way to eat up battery, consume crazy amounts of memory, and get your app killed by iOS's background task limits. Keep it simple, stupid.
2. The Shared Account Nightmare A dad jumped in with a hilarious edge case: "My library is a mix of my stuff and Disney soundtracks for my kids. If your app surfaces 'least played' tracks, is it going to flag all my kids' music for deletion?" Handling edge cases like family-shared profiles is where utility apps either shine or fail miserably. The dev is currently figuring out how to add style/genre exclusions.
3. The Spotify Walled Garden Drama This is where the story gets spicy. Someone innocently asked: "Any plans for Spotify support?" The dev dropped a bitter truth bomb: "The plan was to support Spotify, but sadly that is impossible because last year they blocked small developers from ever using their APIs." Yep. If you want to use Spotify's Web API nowadays, one of their requirements is having 250,000 Monthly Active Users. They essentially slammed the door on indie hackers, probably because they don't want small devs hammering their VPS with API calls. It's a brutal reminder of platform risk.
Beyond just being a cool music cleanup tool, this launch drops some solid lessons for us code monkeys:
If your Apple Music is a mess, go give it a spin. If nothing else, it's a good study in building a clean, native iOS utility app.
Sauce: Product Hunt - Song Sweeper
