Hitster app

Hitster is a musical party game by Koninklijke Jumbo, which conquered the Dutch board game market in 2022. Simple and catchy, Hitster is accessible to everyone. It is played in teams or individually, and the goal is simple: guess the correct year of a pop song ten times and place 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, a player scans the code on the playing card, after which the corresponding song is played via music streaming platforms like Spotify.

Huge hit
Hitster has rapidly grown into a huge hit. The game can now be found in one in five Dutch households, accounting for more than a million downloads. It is available in over twenty countries and languages. This success also came as a surprise to game publisher Jumbo. The Hitster app was not yet optimised for such massive usage. When Jumbo approached us to improve the app, it sounded like music to our ears (pun intended). Consequently, together with Jumbo, we first tackled the old React Native app, and subsequently rebuilt the new native iOS and Android apps.

Completely new app
Together with Jumbo, we decided to lay a new foundation for the apps. So, two native apps for the smoothest possible user experience, a stable back-end, and a user-friendly CMS for Jumbo's editors managing tracks easier. The goal was to make iOS and Android feel identical. An additional challenge involved: the design of the app. For the development of the new app, we were faced with the question: create a completely new design or translate the packaging design into the digital realm. We opted for a nice pragmatic approach: using a provisional design and initially developing the app itself.

Nobody said it was easy
An important foundation of the Hitster app are music streaming platforms. All QR codes on the playing cards link directly to songs. Sounds simple, but not everyone has a music streaming app on their phone. Or when they do, they have a free account (with ads). Our challenge: to ensure that everyone can use the Hitster app.

Always a new challenge
Together with Jumbo, we have also considered further optimisations of the user experience. To let users hear a song preview, a new game mode was devised, the ‘flip your phone mode’. With this game mode specifically for people without a paid Spotify account, the song will only start playing once the player has flipped their device over. As a result, no one sees which song is being played. (When the paid Spotify app is available on a phone, the name and song are not displayed.)

Adding new songs with ease
Not only was the Hitster app due for replacement, the entire CMS behind the application had tos be set up. To support the work of the editors at Jumbo as best as possible, we paid a lot of attention to the user-friendliness of the CMS. All with the aim of preventing duplicate work and allowing editors to quickly and easily add songs to new editions of Hitster.

So I say thank you for the music
The new version of the Hitster app was gradually rolled out at the end of 2025. 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.