Queue
Queue is the simplest podcast app out there. New episodes from your subscriptions just show up in one list ‒ your Queue, so you can play them or archive them without any fuss. No playlists, no settings, just a clean, easy way to keep up with your shows.
Get to know Queue
Who’s behind Queue?
Hey, I’m Eike. I’ve been designing apps for almost 10 years now, mostly in small early stage startups. The biggest company I ever designed for was Trade Republic, a popular stock trading app from Berlin. It was small when I joined, around 25 people, and grew to about 700 when I left 3.5 years later.
Around the end of my time at Trade Republic, I realized that what I enjoy most is making things to express myself. Some mix of design & art. And that's really hard to do in bigger companies, where you're a small part of the team, responsible for a small part of the product, and even then you can rarely make creative decisions yourself.
I then joined a small team which went on to create Bento, a more visual Link-in-bio service. We had so much fun building the product and interacting with the community, and I wanted to keep doing this forever - build cool things in very small teams for an excited audience.
After Bento was acquired, I started to get into iOS development, originally with the help of a few friends of mine – Silvan, Dennis, and Mugeeb – to finally build apps by myself. ChatGPT had just come out and proved to be very helpful with coding, and frameworks like SwiftUI had become so approachable that I even could manage to understand them.
Since I'm a heavy podcast listener (hours every single day) and I didn't really love any of the existing podcast apps, I decided to play with that and managed to ultimately launch Queue. The excited response I receive from passionate daily users of Queue is exactly why I'm doing what I'm doing.
What’s Queue and what’s so cool about it?
Queue is the simplest podcast app out there. The app consists largely out of one single view, your Queue. When your podcast subscriptions release new episode, they automatically get added to the top of your Queue. Here you can play them, archive them, or move them to a different place in the list. No playlists, no clicking in and out of podcasts to see if new episodes came out, none of that. Just one single auto-updated list of your podcast episodes.
The design is based on my conviction that this is the best way to listen to podcasts, and such an app didn't exist yet.
There are the big podcast apps (Spotify, Apple Podcasts) that have one million features and don't really have a focus because they're trying to appeal to the broad market. And then there are niche enthusiast podcast apps like Castro or Overcast that are optimised for enthusiast listeners that care about the very best audio-engine and fine grained listening controls.
Queue instead optimises for simplicity. The app is making a lot of intentional decisions for you, knowing that it this excludes some people who prefer to customise their experience. This allows it to be by far the simplest podcast app out there that requires zero configuration. Download the app, subscribe to your podcasts, and everything else happens automatically.
I was lucky enough to have caught quite the attention with my announcement post as well as subsequent feature launches over the last few months. I was featured on The Verge in David Pierce's weekly newsletter, in Club MacStories, in multiple tech podcasts, and most recently on 9to5Mac. And I'm having super fun and interesting conversations with users every single day that help make the app better.
Tool Stack of Queue
What’s under Queue’s hood? Which technologies were used and why did you chose them?
I'm developing Queue in Xcode with the help of ChatGPT. Usually I have the Mac app open next to Xcode and move back and forth between both. I haven't tried Cursor yet which a lot of people strongly recommend, but so far this setup has worked great for me.
Queue is written in Swift & SwiftUI and I'm using Supabase as my database and authentication provider. And RevenueCat handles my subscription tiers.
Queue also has a very small web component, used to allow sharing of podcasts and episodes. It's written in React & Tailwind, using VSCode, and deployed using Vercel.
Do you use any other tools to run the business?
I only use Figma for visual asset creation like UI icons or App Store screenshots. The design of actual screens happens directly in SwiftUI. And I'm not doing any marketing besides posting on my own social channels.
What’s your personal stack? Which apps do you and your team love?
The only productivity app I use is Things. I use it both for my private to-dos as well as for work related tasks, and it works perfectly for me. It's super simple and has a beautiful design, and since I'm working on Queue all by myself, I have no need for any collaboration features.
I use Arc as my browser, Notion Mail as my email client, Apple Notes for note taking, and Things for tasks.
Anything else you’d like to share?
If you didn't have a chance to try Queue yet, I'd love for you to give it a chance and let me know what you think. Every single person that reaches out with a constructive review or a thoughtful email is endlessly motivating and reminds my of why I'm doing this. And maybe you'll find your next daily driver podcast app :)
Now, discover Queue for yourself
Huge thanks to Eike for sharing the story behind Queue and the details on the building blocks that make it such a great podcasting app. Now go download it yourself and experience podcasts in a new way.