Retro Pod played directly into TikTok’s love affair with the iPod. From demos of defunct Minis to outfits featuring Shuffles as hair clips, an app that turns your iPhone into an iPod was bound to be a hit. When Retro Pod started making the rounds at the end of December, TikTokers praised the app’s ability to mimic the iPod’s “tactile, bumpy, vibrating feel” that has been lost in the age of music streaming. Videos featuring the app were viewed nearly 5 million times, but in the second week of January, viewers began commenting that they couldn’t find the app at all. Retro Pod had disappeared from the App Store.
It’s not confirmed why Retro Pod was removed from the App Store – neither the developer of the app nor Apple have returned The edgerequest for comment. But it’s not hard to imagine that once the app exploded, Apple wouldn’t let it go. The company has one very explicit rule against apps that replicate Apple products.
But Retro Pod had a good run. According to analytics company Sensor Tower, the app received a total of 443,000 downloads on iOS, with 275,000 in the first week of January. It peaked at number 11 among music apps in the US before it was apparently removed on January 8.
“People really want it. It is a piece of cultural heritage.”
Apps that mimic the iPod have popped up a number of times over the years, even when iPods were common household gadgets. In 2009, iClassic was released for iOS as a jailbroken app. In 2019, (another) retro Pod app has been made available on Android, and iPod.js debuted as a web-based iPod. Coinciding with the success of Retro Pod, iPod.js has also recently gone viral. Developer Tanner Villarete says the site has had a total of 1.8 million users, two-thirds of them in the past week or so.
While those were made outside the confines of the App Store, Apple has slipped in another iPod clone before. In 2019, an iOS app called Rewound attempted to function within Apple’s ecosystem. Two months after its debut, it got a big buzz on the internet and was downloaded 150,000 times. Then Apple put the kibosh on it. Rewound’s developer, Louis Anslow, said the app was initially removed for violating Apple’s rules on in-app purchases. He modified and re-released it before Apple removed it again to replicate an Apple product.
Like Retro Pod, Rewound flew a little too close to the sun. The apps should have been rejected in the first place, but Apple’s moderation team failed to accommodate them. Retro Pod even could to make five updates after debuting in October – the latest in a series of apps that only caught on when others called attention to it. If an app is ever really going to emulate the iPod experience for iOS users, it’s going to need Apple’s improbable approval.
The market is also not what it was when Rewound was withdrawn. Three years ago, Apple was still selling iPods (even though that latest model, the iPod Touch, was really just an iPhone minus the phone). Apple officially killed off the iPod earlier this year. Between Apple moving away from the iPod and consumers’ nostalgia for the product, Anslow thinks there’s more need than ever for an app that can turn an iPhone into an iPod.
“I’m just committed to trying to get this back,” Anslow says. “Because people really want it. It is a piece of cultural heritage.”
While the public may still view the iPod as a nostalgic relic, it’s still Apple’s proprietary technology. The rules governing what can and cannot be an iOS app are what Apple wants them to be. Until the company loosens its vice grip on its dormant IP, a true iPhone-to-iPod app probably won’t last — unless, of course, Apple decides to release such an app itself. It seems like a missed opportunity for them to ignore the question.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the original iPod.js redirects users to their Spotify libraries. It streams music in the browser instead. Another version of iPod.js redirects to Spotify.
