Mehfil for Android

• Download the whole playlist

  One song, a handful, or every track in the list — as audio, or as the video. It downloads in the background and you can stop any of it at any point.

• Then play it with no signal

  On a flight, on the underground, out where there are no bars. What you have downloaded plays the same as it does here.

• Search for any song at all

  Not only the ones you have already played. Type a name, get the song, press play — no link to find, nothing to paste.

• Every song survives a locked screen

  Not most of them. Lock the phone or open something else and it carries on, with the song and the controls where you expect them.

• Watch it, then walk away

  Full screen, double-tap to skip, the same speed control. Leave the app mid-video and the song hands itself over to the audio and keeps going.

• On your home screen

  A small widget showing what is playing. Tap it and you are back where you were.

Two reasons, and neither is fixable in a website. A phone browser is not allowed to keep a page running once you leave it — it gets suspended, which is what stops the music. And a page cannot save a song to your phone for later in any way that survives clearing your browser data.

The website works around the first one as far as a website is permitted to: it holds the page open while something is playing, and the lock screen controls restart it if your phone stops it anyway. The app does not have to work around anything.

1. 1

   Download the file

   The button above saves mehfil.apk to your phone. It is about the size of a couple of songs.

2. 2

   Allow the install, once

   Your phone will ask whether to allow an app from outside the Play Store, because that is exactly what this is. Say yes and it will not ask again.

3. 3

   Open it and paste a playlist

   No account, no setup screen. If you already use Mehfil in a browser, sign in and your saved playlists are there.

Not being on the Play Store is a cost, not a feature. A Play Store listing costs a one-off developer fee, and until that is paid the app is distributed as a file — which is why your phone shows a warning. The app is built from this public source, so the warning is about how it reached you, not what is in it.

There are no ads between songs, and it is not a way to get paid music for nothing — it plays the public playlists you already have. Songs that exist only as a video still carry whatever that video carries.

There is no iPhone version. Apple requires an annual developer subscription to put an app on a phone at all, so for now iPhone means the website — add Mehfil to your home screen and it behaves as closely to an app as iOS allows.