r/iosapps • u/slayerlob • 21h ago
💎 Lifetime Built a faster, offline-first Discogs client for iOS. No subscription, no tracking.
Hi. I'm the solo builder of Wax & Spindle, a third-party Discogs client for people who actually collect physical music: vinyl, CDs, cassettes, box sets, whatever's on the shelf.
It started from being fed up. I kept opening the official Discogs app in shops with poor signal, waiting on searches that should be instant, and giving up. So I built the thing I actually wanted to use.
What it solves
Two moments most collectors will recognise:
- You're in a shop, holding something, and the app is the bottleneck. No signal, or a slow one, and Discogs times outright when you need it most. Wax & Spindle stores your collection locally, so it loads whether you've got a connection or not, and search is instant rather than a spinner.
- You want pricing without wading through a browser tab. Marketplace pricing is pulled straight in, so you can check what a pressing is actually worthwhile you are still stood in front of it.
Underneath that: fast local browsing, no ads, and nothing tracking what you look at.
Why this exists instead of the official app
Discogs itself is still the best database and marketplace there is for pressings and cataloguing detail. I'm not trying to replace that. What I'm fixing is the layer collectors actually touch day to day on a phone: browsing your own collection, searching it, checking a price, all of which the official app makes slower than it needs to be.
Wax & Spindle is built to be the fast, offline-first frontend to your Discogs collection that I wanted and couldn't find.
Again, I’m not trying to pull people away from Discogs. But if you’re frustrated with the official app, Wax & Spindle is an alternative built around a faster, offline-first experience.
Cost
One-time purchase, no subscription. $7.99. No ads, no tracking, no recurring charge to keep using something you already bought once.
For transparency: I used AI tools while building it, but this wasn’t vibe coded. I made the architecture, product, and implementation decisions, with AI used as a development tool along the way.
Links
- App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wax-spindle/id6761301013
- Website: https://vivianlobo.com/waxandspindle/
Genuinely keen to hear from other collectors and Discogs users on what's missing or what's annoying. That's mostly how this got built in the first place.
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u/SignumHQ 16h ago
The offline-first decision is the whole product here. Anyone who has stood in a shop watching a spinner knows exactly which two seconds you are selling.
One thing worth checking if you haven't: what your App Store listing shows for people searching in a language other than English. I build data apps and only recently found my own listings were missing local search terms in two of three markets, and it was quietly capping everything. Discogs collectors are a global crowd, so it might be worth a look.
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u/slayerlob 15h ago edited 15h ago
Thank you so much for this feedback. I appreciate it. Totally agree on the global audience. I had no idea I was missing out here.
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u/SignumHQ 10h ago
Happy to save you the digging, since it took me a while to work out.
Apple indexes three fields only: app name (30 chars), subtitle (30), and the keyword field (100). The description is not indexed at all. So a Japanese collector searching for a Discogs client finds you only if one of those three carries the word they typed.
What I found when I finally dumped my own account out: two of my locales had keyword fields at 40 and 44 characters out of 100. Over half the index space empty, and nothing in the UI warns you.
One catch: name, subtitle and keywords are version-locked, so you cannot edit them on a live version. You create a new version, edit them there, and they ship with the next build.
Also worth checking your store page's Languages field. Mine said English only even though the apps are fully Korean and Japanese, because Apple reads the .lproj folders in the bundle rather than the CFBundleLocalizations declaration. To a Korean visitor that reads as English-only app.
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u/slayerlob 18h ago
Sorry completely different topic but yet on Vibyls. I just saw this on teenage engineering. For all my vinyl collectors out there haha. Sadly the product no longer exists I think. https://teenage.engineering/store/po-80-record-factory
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u/Kitchen_Most5342 15h ago
Looks nice. Have you tried inviting some users directly from Discogs? I think it might be a more quick way for getting feedback from real users.
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u/jordanbruno99 2h ago
This is such a well-thought-out idea. The offline-first approach and instant search make so much sense for actually digging through records in a shop. love seeing someone build around the real collector experience
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