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Kirkland, WA, September 14, 2026. Spinstack, the indie vinyl-collection app for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Apple TV, ships version 1.5 today. It is the release where the app stops taking a collector's word for a record's condition and measures it instead. Groove Vision reads scratch depth in the groove with the LiDAR sensor on iPhone Pro and iPad Pro. Scratch Detection listens through the microphone while a side plays and maps every mark, track by track. What comes out is not a grade someone typed once. It is evidence.

1.5 turns that evidence into things a collector can use. The Condition Card is a shareable image with every detected scratch drawn where it actually sits in the grooves, sized and coloured by severity. The Condition Receipt, a one-record document for a buyer or an insurer, is free for everyone. And since the release's final build arc, condition moves the money: any record with a media grade now shows what that specific copy is plausibly worth, not just the market floor across all conditions.

"Every vinyl app on the market can tell you that you own a record. None of them can tell you what shape it is in. A grade typed into a box six months ago under bad light is a guess wearing a uniform. Your phone already has the sensors to do better, so 1.5 uses them, and then it does the obvious next thing: it prices the copy you actually own rather than the cheapest one on the market."

-- Vaha, developer

Record condition, measured

A new Condition tab collects the work: a health card counting how many records are graded and what the ungraded ones are worth, a queue sorted by value so the copies worth checking first come first, and the two measuring tools. Groove Vision takes four macro captures and lets the worst quadrant set the grade, because the needle hits every scratch, not the average one. Scratch Detection runs during a Silent Session and confirms a mark when it recurs across plays. Every detected scratch is stamped with the loudness of the music around it, so the app can say which marks a listener will actually hear rather than which ones exist.

Condition Read, on iOS 27, has Apple Intelligence read a record's own evidence, including the Groove Vision scan photo, and write a short appraiser-style note on the record page and the Receipt. Every claim comes from that record's own data, and the photo never leaves the device. Condition-adjusted values are estimates and the app says so on every surface that shows one. They are not professional appraisals, and the collector percentages behind them are a longstanding convention rather than a Spinstack invention.

Tap the sleeve

NFC tags on record sleeves were already a first among Discogs companion apps. In 1.5 a tap opens the Tap Card: the pressing, the grades and the scan, the current value, the play history, the sound measured from that very copy, and its scratch map, on one card, instantly and entirely offline. Five actions sit on the card, from quick-logging a spin to starting a Silent Session. Sections with no data are simply absent. A record never played gets one line: never played, tonight could fix that. The tags themselves are ordinary passive stickers a collector buys separately.

Nineteen surfaces, none of them in the cloud

Spinstack runs nineteen Apple Intelligence surfaces and every one of them executes on the device. There is no server-side inference anywhere in the app, because there is no Spinstack server. Ask Your Collection answers questions in plain language by searching the collection, counting it and reading the listening history rather than guessing, and it works from Siri as well as in the app. Sonic Fingerprint measures a playing record on iOS 27: tempo, key, loudness, structure and instruments, taken from the copy on the turntable rather than from a database. AI features require Apple Intelligence on a supported device.

The living room, caught up

Apple TV stops being a browser and becomes a member of the family. Now Spinning fills the screen with the sleeve, a disc turning at a real 33 1/3 rpm and a running clock, and pressing Finish logs the spin with its true listening time. Game Night is a pass-the-remote quiz built entirely from the user's own records, for two to eight players, where nobody has to type anything. The Collection Appraisal and Price Watchdog reach the big screen and agree with the iPhone and the PDF to the dollar.

A card on a record shop counter

1.5 ships an App Clip for independent record stores. A printed code on the counter opens a store-welcomed pocket version of Spinstack that scans any barcode in the bins and identifies the exact pressing, with no install and no account. Each store gets a staff-picks shelf and a storefront it updates by changing one file, with no app build and no review. For collectors who already have Spinstack, a known store's card now opens a day-long visit rather than a four-second toast. The clip is a small fraction of Apple's 15 MB ceiling and ships in all sixteen languages.

By the numbers

1.5 is 529 commits across 50 days and 131 builds, by one developer. The in-app Guide documents 169 features, 28 of them new in this release, in a searchable and fully translated list. The app carries 5,496 localized strings across sixteen languages, two of them right-to-left, covering permission prompts, Home Screen quick actions and every Siri phrase. There are 22 Siri and Shortcuts intents, 12 widgets, 3 Live Activities and 3 Control Center controls. 715 automated tests across 73 suites pass at the shipping build. The app contains zero third-party SDKs, zero analytics, zero tracking, and 1.5 asks for no permission that 1.4.6 did not.

About Spinstack

Spinstack is designed and built by one person, a working record collector, over more than two and a half years. It is built on Discogs, so new users need a free Discogs account, and it surfaces Discogs marketplace value while buying and selling continue to happen on Discogs itself. The app uses CloudKit, WidgetKit, Core NFC, App Intents, Foundation Models, ARKit, Vision, TipKit, MusicKit, ActivityKit and tvOS. Pricing is a single $9.99 unlock with a 30-day free trial and no subscription. The Condition Receipt became free for everyone in this release.

Spinstack 1.5 is available now at spinstackios.app and on the App Store. The full feature breakdown is at What's New in 1.5.

Kirkland, WA, June 1, 2026. Spinstack, the indie vinyl-collection app for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV, ships version 1.4 today. It is the largest release in the app's history: 107 TestFlight builds across six months, touching every surface a collector sees. The headline is AI Liner Notes, an opt-in layer that uses Apple's on-device language model to write personalized text about a collector's own records. Nothing leaves the phone.

1.4 also ships Groove Vision, a close-range condition scanner that uses the camera and LiDAR to detect surface marks at half-millimeter scale. AppIntent snippet cards turn every Siri shortcut into a visual answer with cover art and action buttons. A full Last.fm hub surfaces lifetime listening stats alongside the vinyl collection. Listening Sessions give names to the nights. And The B-Side adds a tab that shows reactions friends have left on your spins.

"A vinyl collection is not a list. It is a self-portrait. Every record on your shelf is something you chose. Every spin is something you returned to. Other apps treat that like a database. Spinstack 1.4 treats it like the way you actually listen."

-- Vaha, developer

AI Liner Notes

Apple's on-device Foundation Models framework now writes short personalized text in six places across Spinstack. The feature lives in Settings, under Spinstack Labs, opt-in and off by default. It requires Apple Intelligence.

Vinyl DNA writes a narrative paragraph about a collector's archetype based on top genres, decades, labels, and collection size. Crate Dig pitches each card in one sentence about the collector's shelf. Sonic Connections explains each hop in the strongest-chain graph. Spin Log suggests moods from freeform listening notes. Release Detail summarizes long Discogs descriptions into a pull-quote. Spin Log Analytics says one true thing about the week.

Everything runs on the device. The model never sees a server. If a device does not support Apple Intelligence, the hand-written copy stays exactly where it was.

Groove Vision

Hold the phone four to six inches above the record. The camera reads the surface. The LiDAR feels the depth of the grooves. A small ring on screen turns green when distance, surface flatness, tilt, and steadiness all pass at once.

Groove Vision can spot scratches at half-millimeter scale. It can measure warp. It will not tell you the grade. The heuristic that generates a suggested grade was deliberately hidden until enough collector-corrected scans exist to train a real CoreML model. Until then, the user's eye is the only grade. Factual observations like surface mark count and LiDAR-derived flatness stay visible because those are real measurements, not judgments.

An opt-in contribution toggle lets collectors upload anonymous scan data to a developer-owned training corpus. No user identity, no Discogs username, no release ID, no location. Each upload carries a fresh anonymous UUID. Withdraw all contributions in one tap.

Seven Siri Shortcuts With Cards

All seven Spinstack Siri shortcuts now return a visual card alongside the spoken response. Ask for a random record and get cover art, title, artist, and a gradient tinted by the album's dominant color. Ask what you played last and get the cover with rating stars and mood chips. Ask your spin streak and get a number tile with a seven-day dot strip. Every card has action buttons: Log Spin, Pick Another, Log Again, Played, Skip. Built on iOS 26's new AppIntent snippet views.

Last.fm Hub

Connecting a Last.fm account now unlocks a full lifetime listening profile: total scrobbles, unique artists, unique albums, account age, and country. Top Artists, Top Albums, and Top Tracks surface with a period picker spanning seven days to all time. Loved Tracks and Recently Scrobbled round out the hub.

The In Your Collection section was built specifically for collectors who care about both streaming data and physical media. It intersects Last.fm top artists with the Discogs collection and shows exactly which records match. The artists you listen to most. The ones you own on vinyl. The overlap between them.

Listening Sessions and The B-Side

Listening Sessions give names to the nights. Create a session, assign spins, add freeform notes. A spin can belong to many sessions. The Spin Log reads like a diary: days as headers, sessions inline. Six new mood tags ship with 1.4: Sunday Morning, Date Night, Rainy Day, Nostalgic, First Listen, and Comfort.

The B-Side, Spinstack's private friend feed, adds a You tab that collects every reaction friends have left on your spins, collection adds, and wishlist adds. Friend Compare now renders the full overlap instead of capping at twenty thumbnails.

Also in 1.4

Vinyl Shelves graduate from Labs and become the default home layout: soft reflections, a hairline shelf line, no card chrome. Today's Pick gives the Discover tab a magazine-layout hero sized large on iPad. A personalized onboarding flow asks four quick questions and tunes the app's first suggestions to the collector's style. Your Pressing lets collectors pin down which physical pressing they own when an album has multiple versions on Discogs. Matrix and runout codes appear on barcode results. Custom records, Marketplace improvements, Ambient Mode, and a dedicated iPad polish pass across roughly twenty surfaces round out the release.

Localization catches up with 830 new translation values across German, Spanish, French, Croatian, and Japanese. A global "Ignore leading The" toggle teaches alphabetical sorts to file The Beatles under B.

About Spinstack

Spinstack is built by a solo developer who is himself a working vinyl collector. The app uses CloudKit, WidgetKit, Core NFC, App Intents, Foundation Models, CoreML, ARKit, Vision, TipKit, MusicKit, ActivityKit, Catalyst, and tvOS. Pricing is a single $9.99 unlock with a 30-day free trial. No subscription.

Spinstack is available now at spinstackios.app and on the App Store.

Kirkland, WA, May 1, 2026. Spinstack, the indie vinyl-collection app for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV, ships version 1.3 today across all App Store regions.

The 1.3 release headlines a rare upgrade story for a small developer in 2026: Crate Dig, Spinstack's swipeable surprise-pull-from-your-shelves feature, graduates out of Spinstack Pro and joins every tier. Free-trial users, paid Pro users, and users past their trial all gain the full Crate Dig experience.

"Crate Dig runs entirely on the user's own collection data. There's no API call to make, no infrastructure cost, no reason it had to be behind a paywall except habit. The feature works better as a trust-builder than as a paywall lock. Pulling it down was the right call."

Vaha, developer

Japanese launches as Spinstack's fifth supported language in 1.3, joining English, German, Spanish, French, and Croatian. The localization covers iOS, tvOS, and Apple TV widgets, including the paywall, Crate Dig, and What's New screens.

The 1.3 release also adds cache-first launches, a new Sort by Decade option, simplified Last.fm scrobbling, and a fix to pull-to-refresh that now reloads the entire collection rather than just the first page.

What's next

Spinstack 1.4 shipped on June 1, 2026. See the 1.4 press release for the full story: AI Liner Notes, Groove Vision condition scanning, seven Siri shortcuts with visual cards, the Last.fm hub, Listening Sessions, and more.

About Spinstack

Spinstack is built by a solo developer who is himself a working vinyl collector. The app uses CloudKit, WidgetKit, Core NFC, App Intents, Vision, TipKit, MusicKit, ActivityKit, Catalyst, and tvOS. Pricing is a single $9.99 unlock with a 30-day free trial. No subscription.

Spinstack is available now at spinstackios.app and on the App Store.

Kirkland, WA, April 13, 2026. Spinstack, the indie vinyl-collection app for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV, ships version 1.2 four days after its App Store debut with ten new features headlined by The B-Side, a private social feed built for vinyl collectors.

The B-Side is Spinstack's social layer. It works like a live feed of what your friends are spinning, adding, and wanting, with posts that expire after seven days. Privacy is the default: nothing publishes unless the user opts in. The feed surfaces listening activity across friends without requiring anyone to follow, like, or comment.

"Social in a record app should feel like walking into a friend's listening room, not like opening a social network. The B-Side is designed to fade into the background until something interesting happens."

Vaha, developer

NFC: Tap to Spin lets collectors write NFC tags and stick them on record sleeves. Tapping a tagged sleeve opens the record instantly for viewing, logging, or quick-logging a spin. Batch Tag mode walks through the entire collection one record at a time for mass-tagging sessions.

The rebuilt barcode scanner adds a torch toggle, live match previews during scanning, duplicate warnings before adding, and a drag-to-reorder review screen. Bulk Scan mode lets collectors work through a stack without stopping.

Also in 1.2

Play Next Queue gives collectors a listening queue they can reorder, clear, or shuffle. Other Pressings surfaces every version of a record on Discogs from the release detail page. Condition Tracker logs sleeve and media grades with notes. Price Watchdog watches market values with per-release sparklines, biggest movers, and wishlist target-price alerts. Smart Notifications deliver alerts for wishlist availability, price drops, and friend activity. DJ-friendly ratings and notes round out the release with five-star ratings and per-track notes on the spin log.

The 1.2 update also introduces Spinstack Pro, a $9.99 one-time unlock that gates the advanced features: Crate Dig, Vinyl Vision, Spin Analytics, The B-Side, NFC, Bulk Scan, Last.fm scrobbling, Price Watchdog, Wax Timeline, and Smart Notifications. Core features remain free after the 30-day trial.

About Spinstack

Spinstack is built by a solo developer who is himself a working vinyl collector. Pricing is a single $9.99 unlock with a 30-day free trial. No subscription.

Spinstack is available now at spinstackios.app and on the App Store.

Kirkland, WA, April 9, 2026. Spinstack, a new vinyl-collection app for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV, launches today on the App Store. Built by a solo developer and working vinyl collector, Spinstack connects to a user's Discogs account and turns their collection into a browsable, sortable, visual library across all Apple platforms.

At launch, Spinstack ships with full Discogs sync for collections, wishlists, and custom folders. Records display in grid or list view with 3D Cover Flow, a depth-blurred, reflection-backed carousel that works in portrait and landscape with momentum swipes.

"Every vinyl app I tried felt like a database with album art bolted on. I wanted something that felt like flipping through records, not scrolling through rows. Spinstack is the app I built because it didn't exist."

Vaha, developer

Spin Log lets collectors log every listening session with date, five-star rating, mood tags, and track selections. Logs sync across devices via CloudKit. The barcode scanner identifies records by scanning the sleeve, with live match previews and duplicate warnings.

Search works across the user's own library and the full Discogs database simultaneously, with filters for format, year, and country. Artist and label discographies are browsable from any release detail page. Apple Music integration surfaces 30-second previews for every track, or full playback for Apple Music subscribers, with vinyl side positions (A1, A2, B1, B2) displayed inline.

Multi-platform from day one

Spinstack runs natively on iPhone, iPad, and Mac (via Catalyst) with a dedicated tvOS app for Apple TV. The Apple TV experience puts collection cover art on the big screen with grid browsing, Insights, and Ambient Mode. Version 1.1, shipping simultaneously, adds Spin Share Cards in Classic, Dark, and Color styles, where Color extracts a gradient from album art.

Localized in four languages

Spinstack launches with full localization in English, German, Spanish, French, and Croatian, covering all UI strings, App Store metadata, and notification text.

Stats and insights track collection value, top genres, decade breakdowns, and listening milestones. Friends integration lets collectors browse any Discogs user's collection by username, set nicknames, and add records directly.

About Spinstack

Spinstack is built by a solo developer in Kirkland, WA. The app uses CloudKit, WidgetKit, App Intents, Vision, TipKit, Catalyst, and tvOS. Pricing is a single $9.99 unlock with a 30-day free trial. No subscription. No ads.

Spinstack is available now at spinstackios.app and on the App Store.