Eager for the nostalgia of watching residence motion pictures, like within the VHS days, however caught with all of your private movies saved on an iPhone? Positive, you possibly can AirPlay them to the TV, however the expertise isn’t the identical. This wrestle impressed developer Devin Davies to create Cassette, a brand new iOS app that performs again movies in a format much like VHS, making your iPhone movies really feel extra like outdated residence recordings.
To make use of the app, you nearly “load” one of many tapes laid out throughout the display screen by deciding on the 12 months’s movies you wish to view. The movies are labeled with what appear to be handwritten stickers with the 12 months connected to the VHS tape’s cowl sleeve.
You possibly can then watch your life unfold on the display screen with no additional interplay required in your half.
This lean-back expertise introduces a brand new option to devour the media you’ve saved in your system, which is usually left unviewed after the preliminary recording.
The thought for Cassette was prompted by Davies’ buddy and fellow app developer Charlie Chapman, who can be a senior advocate at RevenueCat, a platform that helps cell app builders handle in-app purchases and subscriptions. Chapman complained in a bunch chat about how watching residence motion pictures as a household at this time simply wasn’t the identical because it was when watching outdated household videotapes.
He mentioned he wished there was a option to AirPlay movies to the TV after which have them instantly play one after the opposite.
Davies, finest identified for his award-winning recipe app Crouton, jumped on the thought, hacking collectively Cassette from a customized slideshow app he had made for Apple TV. He later shared a take a look at construct with the group chat.
Techcrunch occasion
San Francisco
|
October 27-29, 2025
“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 instructed TechCrunch. “I’ve never experienced ‘product market fit,’ or whatever you want to call it, like this before,” he mentioned.
The app itself affords a intelligent and easy design, the place you’re introduced with rows of VHS tapes, in all their retro splendor. You faucet on one to nearly “load” it into the TV icon on the prime of the iPhone’s display screen to start out enjoying the video. With AirPlay, you may as well mirror your system to a TV to observe the complete expertise play out on the large display screen.
The movies themselves embrace a location, date, and timestamp displayed in a retro pixel font that appears just like the outdated display screen fonts used on VHS tapes. (Even in the event you’re too younger to recollect VHS tapes, seeing outdated movies on this format pulls on the heartstrings. That may very well be as a result of outdated residence motion pictures are nonetheless recurrently referenced in fashionable motion pictures and TV exhibits throughout sentimental moments and scenes.)
In follow, there have been some challenges that the app nonetheless wants to beat.
In case you have a behavior of downloading on-line movies, like TikToks or Reels, these will present up amongst your “home movies.” Nevertheless, Davies tells TechCrunch that the app is already filtering out display screen recordings, and he’s now trying to see if TikTok movies may very well be filtered out, too.
To assist its growth, Cassette affords an non-obligatory premium subscription (dubbed “ColorPlus”) that permits customers to manually choose a VHS tape as an alternative of getting the app play a video at random. This prices both $0.99 per 30 days or $5.99 per 12 months. There’s additionally an inexpensive Lifetime unlock for $7.99, which might go a great distance towards supporting indie tasks like this.
The app is a free obtain for iPhone and iPad.
