Listen is music player app for iPhone that’s aims to make the experience of listening to your music a “seamless experience”. It makes heavy use of gestures & large UI elements to control the app, making it a great fit for when you’re out traveling and have your iPhone attached to your car’s dashboard or on your bike. Listen makes controlling your music playback incredibly easier with its gesture based approach and works so well that, at times, you don’t even have to look at the screen.
Listen has been designed and developed by the folks at MacPaw, the team from Ukraine also known for apps like CleanMyMac and Gemini. Practically everything in the app is controlled with a gesture, except when you’re using the keyboard to search for something. The main screen has a circular album art of the currently playing album. There’s a circular progress bar around this and a play/pause glyph in the center. Tapping on this toggles the play/pause state. Swiping left or right changes to the next or previous track. Swiping up adds the track to favorites while swiping down takes you to the media library that displays all your albums with circular album art. Unfortunately, a lot of albums look bad thanks to the circular cropped album art displayed on this screen.
The app has some lovely animations & transitions between screens and is a joy to use. The gesture implementation is very well done and works even when you’re not looking at the app. There’s also an option to share your #nowplaying status to Twitter, Facebook, email, etc. Overall, Listen is a wonderfully crafted app that improves the music playing experience on your iPhone, especially when you’re out and about. Unfortunately, the media library grid or the search are the only way to browse your music. There’s no artist view, or genres. I also had trouble getting used to the next/previous track gesture, since it works opposite to the native swipe gesture of moving to the next or previous screen.
Listen is available Free on the App Store and I highly recommend you try it out.