I was staring at yet another Apple Music charge on my account when my brain did something strange: it went back twenty years. I was ten again, running a little Windows tool called streamWriter, recording songs off the radio — because that's just what you did before everything was a subscription. I hadn't thought about that app in over a decade. And then, in 2019, out of nowhere, it came back to me in full: recording streams, downloading YouTube videos, converting them to MP3.
Most memories like that just stay memories. This one didn't. It took a few years and one very productive stretch with Claude Code, but that nostalgic itch eventually turned into StreamWriter Studio — a real app, on the Mac App Store, with paying users. Here's how three months turned a childhood habit into software.
Three Months, Solo, With Claude Code
StreamWriter Studio was developed together with Claude Code, and it took me about three months from start to finish — including publishing and starting to sell it. I've been solo the whole way. It genuinely makes development much easier and faster, and it also makes it easier to improve the app after customer feedback — a lot of users write to me with suggestions, and Claude Code helps me turn those into features quickly. Thanks, Claude :)
That 2019 memory came at a time when I'd just started developing, during my apprenticeship as a Software Engineer at Deutsche Telekom. StreamWriter Studio is actually my second released app; the first was MeetRec for iOS, a meeting recorder and AI summarizer.
From a Windows Memory to a Native Mac App
I set out to build a music player with a built-in YouTube-to-MP3 downloader.
The problem: getting an app like that into the App Store is really hard. Recording radio, on the other hand, has always been legal and unproblematic. So I flipped the order — built a tool that records radio streams and saves them as MP3s with the original cover art, then added the YouTube downloader on top to make the software complete. The concept already existed on Windows, and a lot of people were asking for a native macOS version — but nobody wanted to build it. So I built it from scratch: a modern design, the same core functionality, plus some of the extra features the community had been asking for.
Selling It the Way I'd Want to Buy It
I made StreamWriter Studio a one-time purchase on purpose. Almost everyone pays a monthly subscription for Apple Music, Deezer, Spotify and so on, and I think we all pay too much for subscriptions these days. It's a single purchase, and all future updates are included. Your music should be owned by you, not rented for a monthly fee. Radio was always free — your music should be too.
Find the Community That Already Cares
A good number of my users only found the app because it was listed on Product Hunt and AlternativeTo. A lot of people are actively searching for "the Windows streamWriter alternative for Mac," and now it's there for them to find.By far my best promotion was a thread about the app on iFun.de.
Within the first month, the app reached about 70 users, and the community keeps growing. I get feedback and improvement ideas almost every day — which means my to-do list keeps growing too.
Around that time I also started looking for ways to get my app in front of more people, and that's how I found Setapp. I saw that it curates high-quality software for its users, and I wanted StreamWriter Studio to be part of that.
The Hardest Part, and What's Next
Getting the app into the Mac App Store, with all of Apple's rules, was the hardest part of the whole process. It took some work, but it was manageable in the end.
I have big plans for StreamWriter Studio. The iOS is released now! That way users can send their recorded and downloaded songs from Mac to iPhone via AirDrop in seconds. The reasoning is simple: everyone listens to music on their iPhone — at the gym, on a walk — not on their MacBook. And I have plenty more ideas.
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