A Brief History of Stezza

Stezza launched on the App Store in 2013 as an indie iPhone music player with an unusual design philosophy: oversized buttons, bold tiles, and a deliberate refusal to bury controls behind nested menus. More than a decade later, the same philosophy still shapes the app, but the platforms and music landscape around it have changed considerably.

This page is a casual look back at how Stezza got here.

2013: The Beginning

Stezza was created by independent developer Ricardo Santos (now Foobar Creative). The first release shipped at a time when iOS music apps were largely modelled on Apple’s stock Music app: list views, small controls, a UI optimised for browsing rather than playback.

Stezza took the opposite approach. Inspired by Microsoft’s Metro design language that had emerged in Windows 8 and Windows Phone (bold flat tiles, generous whitespace, type-led layouts), Stezza 1.0 was born.

Windows Phone Metro tile interface, the design language that inspired Stezza 1.0

Big buttons, big artwork, no small touch targets. The design choices were originally aimed at drivers and active users, but it turned out to also make the app exceptionally accessible for people with limited motor control or low vision.

In May 2013, Stezza added universal iPad support, scaling its tile-based interface up to the larger screen.

Going Modern: Dropping the Borders

Stezza 1.0 wore its Metro inspiration on its sleeve, with thick black borders separating each tile. As iOS itself evolved through the iOS 7 redesign, those borders started to look heavy. We dropped them. Same big-button DNA, but cleaner.

Side-by-side comparison of new Stezza without borders next to the original Stezza with thick black borders

The 2.0 update in July 2014 (codename Yergen) consolidated the cleanup: a new theme picker, custom colour themes, blur backgrounds, a redesigned album view, video playback, and improved VoiceOver support, all sharing the same simplified geometry.

The AppRadio Era

For a stretch of the early 2010s, Pioneer’s AppRadio platform was one of the few mass-market ways to bring iPhone apps onto a car’s in-dash display, a precursor to CarPlay that worked over a wired connection and required apps to be specifically designed for the platform.

Stezza was a natural fit. Its tile-based interface scaled cleanly to AppRadio’s screens, the buttons were already car-friendly, and the lack of small touch targets was a real safety advantage compared to the alternatives.

Stezza running on a Pioneer AppRadio head unit, showing album art alongside large playback controls

AppRadioWorld reviewed Stezza in November 2013, calling it “easily the best looking music app for the AppRadio” and praising the “minimalistic yet fully featured interface” that made “taking control of your music very easy.”

As CarPlay took over the in-dash app space, the AppRadio platform was wound down. Stezza retired AppRadio support in version 2.11 (October 2023) and chose to focus on the iPhone itself. The big-button, one-handed design still works exceptionally well in a phone mount, without depending on a discontinued head unit standard.

Stezza 3.0: A Liquid Glass Era

In May 2026, Stezza shipped its biggest release since 2.0 in 2014. Stezza 3.0 is a top-to-bottom redesign built around Apple’s Liquid Glass design language introduced in iOS 26. The classic Stezza DNA carried into a new generation of iPhone.

Three iPhones showing Stezza 3.0's Liquid Glass redesign: library, full-screen player and artist page

The headline change: your iPhone library and Apple Music now share the same stage. Two tabs at the top, the same player, the same queue. No more second-class library tab buried behind algorithmic feeds.

What 3.0 introduced:

  • Unified search across your library and all of Apple Music: songs, albums, artists and playlists grouped into a single result view.
  • Mesh album backgrounds drawn from each track’s artwork, so every song has its own atmosphere.
  • A floating glass mini player reachable from every screen, tapping to expand into a full-screen player with the big buttons Stezza has carried since 2013.
  • Rich artist pages: Play, Shuffle, Station, top songs, full discography and related artists, with album detail and track lists.
  • Full accessibility support for VoiceOver, Dynamic Type and motor-friendly targets, carried forward from previous versions.

Everything Stezza set out to do in 2013 still applies. The platform around it just looks different now.

For a full list of every release going back to 2013, see the changelog.

Press from the early years

A few of the publications that covered Stezza’s launch and major updates:

For more recent coverage, see the Press page.