Shinny Is Now on iPhone

Shinny is now on iPhone. Same hockey, same alerts, same $0 forever — just delivered with the native iOS touches you’d expect: Sign in with Apple, push notifications that show up on your lock screen the moment a session opens, the iOS share sheet for blasting a skate to your group thread, and one-tap handoff into Apple Calendar.

You can find it on the App Store today: search “Shinny pickup hockey” or tap the link at the bottom of this post.

Why a native app at all

For a long stretch we held off on iOS. The web app at shinny.ioalready worked on every phone, every browser. iOS users could “Add to Home Screen” from Safari and the PWA opened fullscreen, with web push working since iOS 16.4. For most use cases, that was enough.

But there were three places the web fell short:

• iOS web push is unreliable.Apple’s implementation requires the user to have explicitly added the site to their Home Screen, many users never do that, and the delivery rate even when set up correctly sits around 70%. Native APNs — what every other iOS app uses — is delivered in under a second, every time. For a “goalie needed in 30 minutes” ping, that’s the difference between making the game and missing it.
• Sign in with Apple doesn’t exist on the web in the same way. It works on iOS Safari, sort of, but it’s a clunky redirect-and-back sequence. Inside a real iOS app, it’s a fingerprint or Face ID and you’re in. Lower friction, fewer drop-offs on signup.
• The share sheet.The single thing iOS users miss most about a web wrapper. “Hey, free goalie spot tonight, here’s the link” is a three-tap motion when you have the native share sheet. It’s seven-plus taps from a PWA, and you usually end up copy-pasting into Messages anyway.

What’s the same

Almost everything. The iOS app loads shinny.iolive, which means every fix, every new rink, every new feature ships to the iOS app the same moment it ships to web and Android. No App Store review cycle for content updates. The app is essentially a thin native shell over the same product you’ve been using.

That has two important consequences. First, your account works everywhere — sign in on the web, you’re signed in on the iOS app, and vice versa. Second, when we ship a goalie-related improvement or a calendar tweak or a new rink-event filter, you don’t need to update the app to get it.

What’s genuinely new

• Native APNs push.Same alert content, ~10× faster delivery, lock-screen interactivity. Tap an alert and you land directly on the session card.
• Sign in with Apple. Email + magic link is still there if you prefer it. Sign in with Apple is just an extra option, with the Face ID flow you already use elsewhere.
• Native share sheet.Every session card on the feed has a share button (🔗) that opens the iOS share sheet directly. Send a skate to a Messages thread, AirDrop it across the room, drop it in a Slack — same workflow as sharing anything else from iOS.
• Apple Calendar handoff. When you RSVP, the session syncs to your iOS Calendar automatically. No download-the-ics step. (The web app still uses the .ics download path for non-Apple calendar tools.)

What we said no to

A few things you might expect from an iOS app launch that aren’t here:

• No in-app purchases. Same promise as web: every feature, free, forever. The App Store listing has zero IAPs.
• No tracking.Apple’s App Tracking Transparency prompt won’t fire because we don’t track. The Privacy Nutrition Card on the App Store listing reflects this honestly.
• No marketing prompts.No “rate this app” spam, no “follow us on social” overlay, no win-back push when you stop opening it. The app’s value is finding you ice; if it can’t do that for you, we’d rather you uninstall than be hounded.

If you’re a goalie, install the app

Web push on iOS is the least-reliable channel we have for “goalie needed” alerts. APNs in the iOS app is the most reliable. For sub-goalies especially — the population most likely to grab a last-minute game — switching from the PWA to the native app is the single biggest signal-to-noise improvement we can offer.

Android coming soon-ish

Shinny has been on the Google Play Store as a wrapper TWA for a few weeks already — same loading-from-shinny.io strategy as iOS. The Android side already handles native push reliably (FCM doesn’t have iOS’s web-push reliability problem), so the iOS launch was the bigger lift. The Android shell will get the same Apple-Sign-In-style auth polish in the coming weeks.

Open in the App Store →

Already have a Shinny account? Sign in with the same email or Apple ID — everything carries over.

For the love of the game.