Application — Ambient audio & focus
Nightshift Radio
Rain on a window at three in the morning, for as long as you need it.
- Play rating
- 4.417,880 ratings
- Installs
- 245K+
The build
Generative ambient audio and a focus timer. Streams nothing — every layer is synthesised on device, so it works on a plane and costs no data.
Nightshift Radio synthesises its soundbeds rather than streaming loops. Rain, valve hum, distant traffic and tape hiss are each a small generator mixed live through Oboe, which means no repetition to notice and no bandwidth to spend.
The engineering constraint is battery. A full eight-hour overnight session had to cost less than a podcast would, so the mixer drops to a reduced generator set when the screen is off and hands the render loop a larger buffer.
Shipped in 2021 and still on a release cadence — it is the title that convinced us that staying with an app for years is more interesting than launching a new one every quarter.
0 KB
data used per listening hour
8 hr
overnight session battery target
2021
shipped, still updated
Who made it
- Audio engineeringMarek Okonjo
- Sound designIlse Ravndal
- Android engineeringDesmond Achebe
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