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A Chinese designer found a way to make your 1,200 dollar iPhone behave like a gadget Apple stopped selling four years ago, and roughly 1.5 million people decided they wanted in. The concept began as a fan render of Apple Music styled like an old iPod. After the views piled up and the requests poured in, the designer spent months turning the picture into working software. The result, UltraPod, now lives as a free beta you can install today.
Here is how it works. The app reskins your music, your books, your camera, and a dozen other functions to look like an early 2000s player. Then a 3D-printed case clamps over the whole phone and blocks it, leaving a small screen window and a round cutout where a click wheel used to be. Your thumb scrolls in circles. Instagram sits underneath, technically reachable, practically forgotten.
Designer: Gigasssss
Apple discontinued the iPod in 2022, retiring the product that taught the company how to put a thousand songs and nothing else into a pocket. Two decades of that single-minded simplicity ended quietly, and the device that killed it was the same one UltraPod now runs on. The music section hooks into Apple Music through MusicKit and plays high-res local files, then wraps the whole thing in a Cover Flow interface that Apple fans have begged to return for years. Gigasssss clearly understood that the iPod felt calm because of what it left out, not because of how its chrome caught the light. Recreating the look is the easy part, and the app nails it.
Fifteen mini-apps fill out the rest, covering Books, Fitness, Camera, Photos, Voice Memos, Notes, Calendar, and a handful of smaller utilities. The Books reader imports EPUB, TXT, and Markdown files, while the Camera leans on retro LUTs so a quick photo stays a photo instead of dragging you into editing and posting. Heck, there’s even a circular keyboard for faster typing because typing on the jogdial really sucked. None of this touches the underlying iPhone, which is the honest tension at the center of UltraPod. The original iPod could not run social media because the hardware simply had no concept of it. Here, every app you wanted to escape sits one home swipe away, dressed over but never removed.
The case completes the experience, limiting how much of your iPhone screen you can see and use, giving it the true iPod appeal. It exposes two zones, a cropped screen at the top for the UI and a circular slot below for the jogdial, and buries the rest of the display under matte black plastic. It’s not too different from the case for the Apple Watch from 2 years ago – except this one isn’t your iPhone cosplaying as an iPod, it’s your iPhone throttled so that it feels less capable than it originally is – because simplicity is sometimes better.
UltraPod is free on TestFlight with limited slots and needs iOS 16 or later, with iPad support that the developer admits still has layout bugs. Every constraint it imposes evaporates the second you slide the phone out of the case, which means this works on friction alone rather than enforcement. For a lot of people, a slightly annoying barrier beats buying and carrying a second device, and that may be the whole point. The iPod was calm because it could do nothing else. UltraPod just gives you a nicer-looking reason not to ask.
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