Cinemate is Appoly’s own app for the evening question of what to watch. Version 2.0 starts with what’s on the streaming services you already pay for, then helps two people agree on something.
Visit cinemate.io
Cinemate has been on the App Store since 2020. By this year it had drifted into being another browsing app, and an audit of the code, design and App Store rules turned up 36 issues, from crash paths to screens still rendering in Arial.
The home feed ignored the services people picked at sign-up and filled up with popular titles from services they didn’t have.
Choosing a U certificate still let adult films through, because the app never sent the information the film database needed to apply it.
The first version compared lists through a QR code or share link, so two people on the same sofa had to connect before they could choose.
JustWatch and Letterboxd are good for browsing and for logging what you’ve seen. We gave Cinemate a narrower job: help the people on the sofa pick something they can start watching tonight. We judged every screen on whether it got them there faster.
Two people take turns on the same phone, each swiping the same twelve titles. At the end they see only the films and shows they both said yes to. The first version compared lists through a QR code or a share link, so two people on one sofa had to connect before they could choose.
The overhaul covered the audit fixes, a redesign, the new features and five new languages, on top of the SwiftUI app we’ve been developing since 2023. We dealt with the riskiest problems first and checked how outside services really behave before building anything on them.
The broken age filter looked fine in the app, because the results it returned were plausible. We found it by querying TMDB, the film database behind Cinemate, directly. It returned 20,001 UK films with the U filter and 20,001 without it. Sending the certification country brought the U-rated search down to 1,078. The TV filter had a second fault, a “greater than” that should have been “less than”, and fixing it cut a 4,456-show result to 651.
We mocked up three visual directions at phone size, with real posters, before choosing one. The winner follows the conventions people know from Netflix and the Apple TV app. It uses true black for a dark room, a single purple accent, the system font with Dynamic Type, and a new wordmark with a purple dot over the i.
Streaming links now come through a small Cloudflare Worker, so the paid API key stays on the server. The Worker checks each user’s sign-in token and caches links at the edge for twelve hours. Testing it against the live service showed the links provider had shut down, so the app falls back to searching inside the streaming service’s own app.
A certificate slider with a plain-English summary and example posters at each level, so parents can see what each setting lets through.
One tap takes a title out of the feed, and you can bring it back from the watchlist. The Tonight filters narrow films by running time or to this year's releases.
Each saved title shows where it's streaming, and titles that leave your services are dimmed.
Trailers play muted as you scroll the feed. Tap Trailer to watch one with sound, or stop it from the menu.
In landscape and in wide iPad windows, the trailer sits on the left and the details on the right.
Guest mode works straight away. Upgrade to email or Sign in with Apple within 30 days and everything you've saved comes with you.
Cinemate 2.0 is free on iPhone and iPad, with no ads.
Down from six: country, services, genres and age rating, then straight into the feed.
Decide together gives both people the same twelve titles, which keeps each round short.
English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, with film details fetched in the same language.
