Streaming, audio, social and content platforms, built in the city where this industry lives. Media apps are unforgiving about two things: playback that stutters and rights that are not respected. Both are architectural decisions, not features.
Catalogue, playback and continue-watching
Music, podcast and live audio apps
Companion apps for BLE audio hardware
Profiles, feeds and creator tooling
Promotion, ticketing and merchandise
Upload, transcode and publishing pipelines
Subscriptions, tips and in-app purchase
Loyalty, drops and community features
Adaptive bitrate and fast start: buffering is the churn driver
Territory windows and protected playback where licences demand it
Metadata and search that stay fast as the library grows
Licensed downloads with expiry handled correctly
Apple and Google take a cut of digital goods: design around it knowingly
BLE connection states that recover from real-world dropouts
Delivery cost per stream modelled before launch, not after
Reporting and review paths for anything user-generated
Ranges, not quotes. Scope, integrations and compliance work move these, so the number we give you after a discovery call is the one that means something.
A catalogue-and-playback MVP runs $45,000-$90,000. A full platform with both mobile apps, offline downloads and subscriptions runs $90,000-$200,000. Streaming with DRM, TV apps and recommendations, or a companion app for audio hardware, runs $200,000-$350,000+. Note that delivery is an ongoing cost, not a build cost: CDN and transcoding scale with watch time, so we model that before you commit to a pricing model.
It depends on what your licences require. Original or owned content often ships fine with signed URLs and token expiry; licensed studio or label content almost always mandates Widevine and FairPlay in the agreement itself. DRM adds meaningful cost and complexity across every client, so the licence terms should settle the question before architecture does.
Yes. That is what we built for LIVV Audio, spanning iOS, Android, a NestJS backend and a React admin dashboard. The engineering reality with BLE is that connection state is unreliable by nature: devices sleep, drift out of range and drop mid-session, so the app has to treat reconnection as a normal path with visible state rather than an error.
Apple and Google require their billing for digital goods sold in-app and take a commission, which materially affects subscription margin. There are legitimate patterns (web-based signup, reader-app provisions for certain categories, external purchase links where permitted), but they come with their own rules and have shifted repeatedly through litigation. Decide this early, because it shapes onboarding.
Three to five months for an MVP, six to ten for a full platform, ten to sixteen for streaming or hardware work. Store review is a real scheduling factor for media apps: rights and content-ratings questions draw more scrutiny than a typical submission.
Tell us what you are trying to ship and we will tell you what it takes — scope, timeline and the parts that usually go wrong.