Transforming one of the worlds top music apps
Building, Scaling, and Transforming the SoundCloud Experience
For years, Think-it has been deeply embedded within SoundCloud’s engineering and product teams, helping to transform the platform across UI, personalization, monetization, and user engagement. Our collaboration has spanned multiple high-impact initiatives—from server-driven UI advancements to expanding accessibility across devices.
Through this partnership, we’ve helped scale innovation, enhance user experiences, and unlock new revenue streams for one of the world’s largest audio streaming platforms.
The Challenge: Scaling a Platform for Millions
SoundCloud’s platform serves 175M+ listeners, requiring continuous innovation to improve engagement, personalization, and monetization. However, scaling an engineering roadmap at this level requires solving for multiple pain points:
A More Flexible & Scalable UI
Moving from static UI to a server-driven approach for faster updates. Optimizing UI performance, layout migration, and resource cleanup
AI-Powered Anti-Abuse & Fraud Prevention
Reducing spam, fraudulent activity, and bot engagement. Improving trust & platform integrity
Optimized Monetization & Data Tracking
Implementing ad revenue solutions & consent management. Standardizing tracking & analytics across iOS, Android, and Web.
Expanding SoundCloud’s Reach & Engagement
Bringing SoundCloud to WearOS, Android Auto, and Android TV. Enhancing messaging & social features for deeper user interaction.
The journey
The challenges
STEP ONE: The Shift to a Smarter SoundCloud
Building a More Agile UI
SoundCloud’s mobile app relied on static UI elements, requiring manual app updates for every layout change. This slowed down experiments, personalization efforts, and feature rollouts.
Our Approach:
Think-it introduced server-driven UI, giving SoundCloud the ability to dynamically update layouts from the backend.
- Backend-controlled UI components enabled real-time updates.
- A/B testing became faster and more efficient without client-side dependencies.
- Playlist and recommendation layouts were redesigned for better user engagement.
The Impact:
- Faster product rollouts & experiments.
- More personalized experiences without requiring app releases.
- Improved content discoverability, leading to higher retention.
STEP TWO: Streamlining Performance & Removing Legacy Code
UI Evo Cleanup
After rolling out the server-driven UI, the next step was cleaning up legacy code and optimizing UI performance.
Our Approach:
- Removed outdated UI layouts & resources to reduce technical debt.
- Migrated UI tests to the new system, ensuring 100% user coverage.
- Used Android profiling tools to optimize rendering efficiency & memory usage.
The Impact:
- Faster UI performance & reduced memory footprint.
- A fully modernized UI infrastructure for future scalability.
- Eliminated redundant screens, reducing app size & complexity.
From here, our team was ready to move into other projects across the platform.
SoundCloud UI Design System and Core modules
STEP THREE: Reducing Spam & Fraud by 80% for 175M+ Listeners
AI-Driven Anti-Abuse & Fraud Detection
As a musical platform, the trust and the safety of both music creators and listeners is vital. Users should feel safe when using the platform, creators should receive authentic engagement, internal teams should be able to take informed actions towards suspicious activity, and payment teams should only pay for authentic plays.
SoundCloud needed a more robust way to detect and prevent fraudulent activity, such as spammy interactions, bot engagement, and fake streaming patterns.
Our Approach:
We developed AI-driven fraud detection models to identify suspicious activity. We implemented real-time spam filtering, ultimately building a scalable anti-abuse system to improve user trust & engagement.
The Impact:
- Spammy comments reduced by 80%.
- More authentic user interactions, improving platform integrity.
- Reduced the need for ad-hoc from daily to every two weeks. This meant that the internal teams were freed up to better work on other projects.
STEP FOUR: Creating a Unified Tracking System Across Platforms
Standardizing Analytics with Tracking Architecture
SoundCloud’s analytics tracking was inconsistent across iOS, Android, and Web, leading to fragmented insights and inefficiencies.
Our Approach:
We designed a new event-tracking system that standardized analytics across all platforms. This improved client-side efficiency, reducing redundant tracking requests. Furthermore, it created a single source of truth for tracking user interactions & performance metrics.
The Impact:
- More reliable cross-platform insights for product teams.
- Improved efficiency in data collection & analysis.
- Faster experimentation & decision-making based on unified data.
STEP FIVE: Driving Engagement Through Messaging & Social Features
Enhancing Conversations & Social Interactions
SoundCloud was missing a private way to chat about music on mobile (a feature available on web). In the past they saw that features that were available on Web only and got introduced on our mobile environment saw an uplift of 70%-250%. SoundCloud wanted to increase the percentage of monthly active users that engage in a conversation.
Our Approach:
We delivered social sharing off-platform to other messengers, provide a tool for listeners to talk about music, and provide a tool for creators to talk workflow and potential collaborations. concretely developing native mobile messaging, making conversations easier, added emoji reactions in the music player for low-friction social interactions. as well as improved content sharing tools, strengthening community engagement.
The Impact:
SoundCloud saw an increase from ~ 2 to 3 million messages every month to 5.1 million messages a month after adopting the mobile messaging.
STEP SIX: Ensure SoundCloud's app usability and availability for all users
Addressing core app quality and accessibility
Our team was now tasked with the essential, often overlooked aspects of user experience, such as accessibility for users with disabilities, optimization for larger screens, and compatibility across a wide range of Android ecosystems, including wearables, TVs, and automotive platforms.
Ensuring compliance with accessibility standards required meticulous attention to detail, particularly when fine-tuning UI elements such as contrast ratios, touch targets, and TalkBack support. Additionally, optimizing the app’s responsiveness for larger screens, foldable devices, and other non-standard form factors posed significant technical challenges.
Android application and library modules structure
We worked closely, balancing technical development, design, and product management and followed a Kanban working style. We brought expertise in Gradle setup and tuning app infrastructure to support platform extensions.
Tackling tech debt, particularly low-level engineering efforts to refactor and optimize reusable libraries, added another layer of complexity to the project.
SoundCloud was now supported on 83 different device models.
Furthermore, the WearOS app had 18,000+ installs in the first month. Additionally, due to app being available on different platforms, the playback time and metric improve significantly.
STEP SEVEN: WearOS, Android Auto & TV: Bringing SoundCloud Everywhere
Expanding SoundCloud Across Devices
To compete in an evolving market, SoundCloud needed to extend its presence beyond mobile and web to wearables, cars, and smart TVs.
Our Approach:
We built WearOS native integration for on-the-go listening as well as developed Android Auto support, allowing seamless in-car music streaming. We further optimized Android TV playback for a full-screen experience.
The Impact:
- New audiences unlocked, increasing total listening hours.
- A seamless cross-platform experience for users across devices.
- Expanded market reach through previously untapped platforms.
Enable sovereign data exchange at the BMW Group
After diving deep into the domain of data spaces we took ownership of setting up a data space connector (DSC) and subsequently integrating and operationalizing it within BMW Group’s existing cloud environment to production-level. This included:
- Adding new functionalities such as usage policies and sovereignty
- Building pipelines to handle building, configuring and deploying the dataspace connector for different environments
- Advising the internal data engineering team on how to create and share resources via the connector
- Conducting design sprints and expert interviews to design and implement a seamless UI
- Integrating the connector within BMW’s Data Portal to allow users to exchange data with external companies using their familiar user interfaces and data catalogues.
- Becoming the subject matter experts within the organization on data space connectors and how to use them.
- Providing documentation and trainings for internal capacity building and knowledge management
Scale sovereign data exchange on an industry level
Beyond enablement of the BMW Group as an organization, Think-it was also appointed on behalf of the Group to make contributions to the Eclipse Dataspace Connector open source effort as one of the core committers since inception of the project.
The Eclipse Dataspace Connector (EDC) has established itself as the current leading Data Space Connector in Europe. The goal of the EDC initiative is to create an efficient and functional data transfer component that implements the protocols of the IDS standard and pursues compatibility with the requirements of the GAIA-X project.
Think-it continues to be one of the most prolific contributors to the open source connector technology
Eclipse GitHub Commits
As one of the core committers and most prolific contributors, we own central areas of the EDC and are involved in defining the functionalities to enhance the usability of the EDC. We also drive decision-making and implementation of central elements and functionalities of the connector and work with the rest of the core committer group to brainstorm, identify and prioritize needs to inform and realize the product roadmap.
We’re the only SDK providers for Java, Node.js, and HTTP, with the Node.js SDK being used by the official Eclipse Data Dashboard
Since the inception of the open source project, Think-it’s team has been playing a major role in driving technological innovation forward and building the functionalities and extensions needed for data spaces such as Catena-X, Mobility Data Space, Market 4.0 and others to reach maturity and operate at scale.