Cloudtape
Your Dropbox music, on your phone.
Our role
Design, iOS build, and marketing site — Expo, React Native, native Swift modules, StoreKit 2.
An offline-first iPhone music player that mirrors the Dropbox folders you pick to the phone and plays everything from local disk.
Cloudtape is our own iPhone app. You pick folders in Dropbox, it mirrors them to the phone in the background, and every song plays from local disk. Nothing streams, so nothing buffers and listening uses no data. The model is the native Music app, done properly, for music that lives in Dropbox. It's a one-time $2.99 unlock after a 14-day trial, with no account, no server, and no analytics — its App Store privacy label is “Data Not Collected.”
It's built on Expo and React Native with TypeScript, with the library in SQLite (Drizzle) and playback on expo-audio. Where Expo didn't reach we wrote native Swift modules: StoreKit 2 purchases, reading the music already on the iPhone, and drawing waveforms with AVAssetReader. Syncs run as iOS background downloads, which can't send Dropbox's header-based arguments, so the app requests a temporary link per file and hands iOS that instead. The design was settled as static HTML mocks before any React Native was written.
Choose the Dropbox folders and Cloudtape keeps them mirrored in the background, following moves and renames instead of downloading everything again.
Albums, artists, and songs across MP3, AAC, ALAC, FLAC, WAV, AIFF, and M4B audiobooks — with music already on the iPhone in the same library.
The seek bar is drawn from each track's own waveform, and long DJ sets and audiobooks resume per file.
Playlists, embedded lyrics, a sleep timer, ReplayGain volume levelling, and Last.fm scrobbling that counts offline plays too.