Waves Podcasts

I love podcasts. None of the apps I tried felt like they did.

problem

Most podcast apps feel like they were built for someone else, power users with hundreds of shows, taxonomy in their head, and a tolerance for cluttered home screens. I'm not that listener. I follow a handful of shows, open the app to see what's new, and want to be told what to play next when I don't know. None of the apps I tried respected that. So I decided to build my own. The harder problem wasn't the app, it was shipping a real iOS product without the two things designers usually start with: Figma, and a developer.

solution

Waves is a podcast app for the casual listener. A personalised home carousel mixes new episodes from shows you follow with curated recommendations, smart folders surface what's breaking in tech and the world, and mood-based picks suggest episodes by what you're up for. Every surface leans into iOS 26's native design language, liquid glass, native page controls, system scroll behaviours, instead of reinventing them.

Designing in code, not for code

I didn't open Figma once. I designed Waves directly in SwiftUI, with Claude Code as the pair that wrote the code I described. The shift was bigger than the toolchain: I stopped mocking screens and started shipping them. The iteration loop collapsed from design → handoff → wait into design → see it move → adjust. It changed what I considered finished, and it pulled motion, performance, and edge cases into the design conversation from day one.

User Understanding

The follower: three to ten shows they care about, opens the app for what's new, not what exists.

The drifter: has no plan, wants something good surfaced without committing to a query or a genre.

Key Design Principles

Personalisation over taxonomy
Native over novel
Motion as feedback, not decoration

Core Features

Mixed home carousel: followed episodes blended with recommendations, auto-advancing with a native filling-pill indicator.
Smart folders: daily-curated reading rooms for breaking news, tech, world.
Mood picker: episodes filtered by how long you've got and what you're up for.
Native iOS 26 player: liquid glass mini and full-screen players, queue, downloads, sleep timer.

Reflection

Waves taught me that the line between designer and developer is mostly tooling. With AI handling the code, the work that was left was the work I already cared about, hierarchy, motion, what the user is actually trying to do. Shipping something real also exposed how much craft only shows up under real conditions: at 60fps, on a slow network, mid-swipe. That's not a question Figma ever asked of me, and it's the one I learned the most from. Download the app here: https://apps.apple.com/in/app/waves-podcast-player/id6761650518