Hitster app

Simple, catchy, and accessible to everyone: the music party game Hitster from Royal Jumbo conquered the Dutch board game market in 2022. Hitster is played in teams or individually, and the goal is simple: guess the correct year of a pop song ten times and arrange those years in the correct order. The game consists of cards with a QR code on one side and the year and song on the other. Using the Hitster app, someone scans the code on the card, after which the corresponding song is played via Spotify.

Huge hit
The music party game quickly became a hit. One in five Dutch households now owns Hitster, and it is available in over twenty countries and 28 languages. This success also came as a bit of a surprise to game publisher Jumbo: the Hitster app wasn't designed for such massive use and received poor reviews. When Jumbo approached us to improve the app, we were thrilled. Together, we first tackled the problems with the old React Native app and then rebuilt the new native iOS and Android apps.

Completely new app
For the rebuild, we decided to lay a completely new foundation. So, two native apps for the smoothest possible user experience, a stable back-end, and a user-friendly CMS for Jumbo's editors to make adding songs easier. The goal was to make iOS and Android feel identical. An additional challenge: the app's design. To build the new app, we were faced with the challenge of creating a completely new design or translating the packaging design to digital. We opted for a pragmatic approach: using a preliminary design and start developing the app.

Nobody said it was easy
The most important foundation of the Hitster app is Spotify. All QR codes on the playing cards link directly to songs on the music streaming service. Sounds simple, but not everyone has the Spotify app on their phone. And some people don't have an account, or have a free account (with ads). Those people wouldn't be able to play Hitster. Our challenge: ensure that everyone, with or without a Spotify account, can use the Hitster app.

Always a new challenge
With the free version of Spotify, it is possible to listen to a song preview of about thirty seconds. We used this functionality to make Hitster accessible to players who don't have a paid Spotify account. This seemed to solve the problem, but it brought with it other challenges. Song previews are only available through the web version of Spotify. With the web version, the song and artist are visible in the app, but that's precisely not what you want to see when playing Hitster. To solve this, we invented a new game mode, "flip your phone mode". With this game mode, especially for people without a paid Spotify account, the song only starts playing once the player has turned their device over. This means no one can see which song is playing. (When the paid Spotify app is available on a phone, the name and song are hidden by a Hitster logo.)

Please don’t stop the music
The most important part of the Hitster app is the Spotify SDK. However, if anything were to change in it, the Hitster app would stop working. To prevent this situation, we also use the aforementioned flip-your-phone mode: as soon as something changes in the Spotify SDK, the back-end of the Hitster app automatically switches to this game mode. So no matter what happens, players can continue playing uninterrupted.

Adding new songs with ease
Not only was the Hitster app due for replacement, but the entire CMS behind it needed to be revamped. To best support the work of the editors at Jumbo, we paid close attention to the user-friendliness of the CMS. All with the aim of preventing duplication of work and allowing editors to quickly and easily add songs to new editions of Hitster.

So I say thank you for the music
By the end of 2025, the new version of the Hitster app was gradually rolled out. The result? A much smoother user experience on iOS and Android, hundreds of new ratings in the app stores with an average of 4.8 stars, and five million scanned game cards within a week.