navidrome to the rescue, finally divesting from spotify

I have been divesting from spotify lately using navidrome. The experience has been amazing. Finding a decent iOS app has been tricky though.

Cutting to the chase- I’m still in between apps. Amperfy definitely has the cleanest most up-to-date interface with the liquid glass display, though I’m encountering bugs as I go through my library. It has better state management than substreamer. Except it keeps making duplicate phantom albums of albums I already have and I’m not sure why? Aside from this, the only thing it’s missing is a server scan button. Though I recently rearranged some things and last time I added music it seemed to be added immediately so will report back.

I also tried substreamer & Flo. I like substreamer more and have gone back to it after encountering the Amperfy bugs. Though now I’m remembering why I didn’t like substreamer, it crashes mid song and never remembers your state when the app exits. I also feel like the way it shuffles is weird, but now that I have more songs in there it might do a better job. Flo had a nice interface but it was struggling with downloading files for offline use for me.

Amperfy works nicely, when it works. It also has the Liquid Glass UI already which I thought for a community app like this was impressive since I had just updated to iOS 26. Simple, customizable and modern looking with a nice queuing system. There is no server refresh button that I could find? But logging into Navidrome briefly is not a huge problem, though of course I’d like to stay in app.

I’ve had a large digital live music library for awhile now and with homelabbing you get accustomed to putting everything on your own server, but for some reason with music I’ve always wanted it on device. I finally let go, and it’s really almost freeing to not be using spotify so much lately. I still track my listens via scrobbles to last.fm, so I’ll have to find a way to do my own ‘wrapped’ with the data I gather next year.