Longing for the nostalgia of watching home movies, like in the VHS days, but stuck with all your personal videos saved on an iPhone? Sure, you can AirPlay them to the TV, but the experience is not the same. This struggle inspired developer Devin Davies to create Cassette, a new iOS app that plays back videos in a format similar to VHS, making your iPhone videos feel more like old home recordings.
To use the app, you virtually “load” one of the tapes laid out across the screen by selecting the year’s videos you want to view. The videos are labeled with what look like handwritten stickers with the year attached to the VHS tape’s cover sleeve.
You can then watch your life unfold on the screen with no further interaction required on your part.
This lean-back experience introduces a new way to consume the media you have saved on your device, which is often left unviewed after the initial recording.
The idea for Cassette was prompted by Davies’ friend and fellow app developer Charlie Chapman, who is also a senior advocate at RevenueCat, a platform that helps mobile app developers manage in-app purchases and subscriptions. Chapman complained in a group chat about how watching home movies as a family today just wasn’t the same as it used to be when watching old family videotapes.
He said he wished there was a way to AirPlay videos to the TV and then have them immediately play one after the other.
Davies, best known for his award-winning recipe app Crouton, jumped on the idea, hacking together Cassette from a custom slideshow app he had made for Apple TV. He later shared a test build with the group chat.
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“I kid you not, the entire group chat had this profound experience with our partners where we stayed up all night watching our kids grow up before our eyes,” Chapman told TechCrunch. “I’ve never experienced ‘product market fit,’ or whatever you want to call it, like this before,” he said.
The app itself offers a clever and simple design, where you’re presented with rows of VHS tapes, in all their retro splendor. You tap on one to virtually “load” it into the TV icon at the top of the iPhone’s screen to start playing the video. With AirPlay, you can also mirror your device to a TV to watch the full experience play out on the big screen.
The videos themselves include a location, date, and timestamp displayed in a retro pixel font that looks like the old screen fonts used on VHS tapes. (Even if you’re too young to remember VHS tapes, seeing old videos in this format pulls on the heartstrings. That could be because old home movies are still regularly referenced in modern movies and TV shows during sentimental moments and scenes.)
In practice, there were some challenges that the app still needs to overcome.
If you have a habit of downloading online videos, like TikToks or Reels, these will show up among your “home movies.” However, Davies tells TechCrunch that the app is already filtering out screen recordings, and he’s now looking to see if TikTok videos could be filtered out, too.
To support its development, Cassette offers an optional premium subscription (dubbed “ColorPlus”) that allows users to manually select a VHS tape instead of having the app play a video at random. This costs either $0.99 per month or $5.99 per year. There’s also an affordable Lifetime unlock for $7.99, which can go a long way toward supporting indie projects like this.
The app is a free download for iPhone and iPad.
