If you’re running Music Assistant on your home server and have been waiting for a proper native iOS client, the wait is over. Mobile MA is a SwiftUI-built iPhone app that connects directly to your Music Assistant instance via WebSocket and puts full control of your music library in your pocket.
What is Mobile MA?
Music Assistant is a popular self-hosted music streaming platform that aggregates sources like Navidrome/Subsonic, Apple Music, Spotify, and local filesystems into one unified library. Mobile MA is a dedicated native iOS client for it — built entirely with SwiftUI, with no external dependencies, targeting iOS 17 and above.
The app was created by Sven Hanold and first submitted to the App Store in April 2026. It is currently at version 1.4 and actively maintained.
Features at a Glance
Library
The Library tab gives you access to your entire music collection, organized into seven sections: Album Artists, Artists, Albums, Playlists, Podcasts, Radio, and Favorites. An alphabetical sidebar on the right lets you jump quickly through large artist or album lists. All data is cached locally on disk, with lazy pagination loading entries in batches of 50. Pull-to-refresh syncs fresh data from the server at any time.
Player Control
The Players tab shows all available Music Assistant players as cards, each with a blurred cover art background, a waveform animation when playing, and a Play/Pause button. Tapping a card opens the full Now Playing view with transport controls (previous, play/pause, next), a smooth progress bar updated client-side, and a volume slider with mute toggle and ±5 step buttons.
Want to play music in multiple rooms in sync? Simply long-press the drag handle on a player card and drop it onto another — Mobile MA will create a sync group via the Music Assistant API. Dissolving the group is just one tap on the red ✕ button.
Queue Management
The redesigned Queue view (introduced in v1.4) shows the full playback queue with the current track highlighted and auto-scrolled into view. Tapping any entry jumps directly to that track. Individual tracks can be removed from the queue. Albums and playlists can be played immediately or added to the end of the current queue — if you have multiple players, a player picker sheet lets you choose.
Search
Full-text search across the entire library. Results appear after a brief typing pause and are grouped by type: Artists, Albums, Tracks, Playlists, and Radio stations. Tapping a result navigates directly to the relevant detail page or, for radio, starts playback immediately.
Favorites
Any artist, album, or track can be marked as a favorite using the heart icon. The UI updates optimistically and syncs with the server in the background. Since v1.4, a brief toast notification confirms when a favorite is added or removed. All favorites are also accessible via the dedicated Favorites tab in the Library.
Podcasts
Introduced in v1.2, the Podcasts section lists all subscribed podcasts and their episodes directly within the Library. Podcast episode playback is handled through the same player infrastructure as music.
Under the Hood
Mobile MA is built on a clean layered architecture using Swift’s @Observable framework (Swift 5.9). The central MAService object coordinates four sub-managers: authentication (Keychain-backed long-lived tokens), WebSocket communication, player state, and library data with disk cache. All three are injected as SwiftUI environment values — no third-party state management library needed.
Image caching uses a custom three-tier system: NSCache (memory LRU) → disk → network. In-App Purchases are handled via StoreKit 2 and offer optional donation tiers (Song, Album, Anthology).
What’s Coming Next
The roadmap includes several upcoming improvements. In the near term: shuffle and repeat controls, interactive seeking in the progress bar, and direct track playback from search results. Further down the line: an iPad-optimized split-view layout, Lock Screen widgets and Live Activities, queue reordering via drag and drop, a sleep timer, and Siri/App Intents integration. Long-term ideas include multi-server support, an Apple Watch companion app, AirPlay routing, and CarPlay support.
Availability
Mobile MA is available on the App Store for iPhone. It requires iOS 17 or later and a running Music Assistant server on your local network or accessible via a reverse proxy. The app is free to download; optional donations can be made via In-App Purchase to support continued development.
Version history:
All versions and updates: Mobile MA section
Help & questions: Support form