About Simplecity Apps

The company

Simplecity Apps Pty Ltd is an Australian proprietary company, registered on 4 July 2018 and based in Geelong, Victoria. It is independent and founder-run: there is no outside investment, no parent company and no advertising business behind it. The company exists to build and support a small number of audio apps properly, over a long period of time.

Being small shapes how we work. We ship fewer features than a larger team would, but the features we do ship are ones we use ourselves every day. Support emails are answered by the person who wrote the code. When something breaks, there is nobody to escalate it to, so it gets fixed.

History

The story starts in 2013, when the first version of Shuttle was published on Google Play under the developer name SimpleCity. It was a local music player, written because Android's built-in options at the time were slow and awkward for people with large offline libraries. Shuttle found an audience of exactly those people, and their feedback has driven the app ever since.

In 2018 the work was incorporated as Simplecity Apps Pty Ltd, giving the apps a proper Australian company behind them.

In 2020 the music player was rebuilt from scratch and released as Shuttle 2. The rewrite modernised the playback engine and the library scanner while keeping what people liked about the original: fast browsing, gapless playback, and full control over your own files.

In 2026 we released Shuttle Podcasts on Google Play, applying the same approach to podcast listening: local-first, no account, and no attempt to become a content platform. An iOS version of Shuttle Podcasts, including CarPlay support, is in development.

Our full catalogue is on our Google Play developer page, and each app is described in detail on our apps page.

What we believe

Local-first

Your music, your downloaded episodes and your subscription list live on your device. Our apps are built to work when you are on a plane, on a train, or somewhere with no signal at all. We do not require you to put your library in someone else's cloud in order to play it.

Private by default

We do not ask you to create an account. We do not build profiles of what you listen to, and we do not sell data to anyone, because we do not collect the kind of data anyone would want to buy. What analytics we do collect is anonymous, aggregate and optional, and it exists only to tell us whether a feature works. This is set out plainly in our privacy policy.

No ads, no tracking

There is no advertising in our apps and no advertising SDK inside them. This website loads no third-party fonts, scripts or analytics of any kind.

Paid-for software

Our apps are paid for by the people who use them, through a one-off purchase or a subscription in the app store. That is the whole business model. It keeps the incentives simple: if the app is good, people pay for it and we can keep working on it.