I Spent $10 on This iPhone App Just to Get More Out of Apple Music

Apple Music on iPhone may be leaps and bounds ahead of the Mac experience, but it’s still a bit underwhelming. Apple is building on this in iOS 26 by introducing new customization features, but an app called Marvis Pro offers these (plus more) right now.

So is Marvis Pro’s price tag worth it? I’ve been playing with the app for a little while now, and I like what I’ve seen so far.

Introducing Marvis Pro

Marvis Pro is essentially an alternative interface for Apple’s Music app for iPhone and iPad (you can even run the iPad version on your Mac, if you want). It lets you access the Apple Music streaming platform as well as any music you have saved locally on your device, via a separate app. The app will ask permission to access your music library the first time you launch it, after which you can use it (almost) exactly like Apple Music.

Think of it like a wrapper for the Music app. Marvis doesn’t add a ton of new features (and it even loses a few), but it makes the most of the experience in a way that Apple’s stock app does not. You’ll need to have the iOS Music app installed on your device to use it. If you don’t have an Apple Music subscription, you’ll get 30-second preview clips when you try to play anything.

Marvis Pro costs $10, which is 99 cents short of a month’s worth of Apple Music at the Individual tier.

How Marvis Pro Improves the Apple Music Experience

One of the main reasons to use Marvis Pro is for its ability to scrobble to Last.fm. This is something Apple’s Music app doesn’t do, and Marvis Pro is arguably the best app for the job if you’re using an iPhone.

Despite being familiar to anyone who has used the stock Music app before, Marvis Pro makes some significant changes in the interface department. The app doesn’t use tabs at the bottom of the screen, and instead includes an iTunes-like sidebar. This can vastly speed up navigation, allowing you to swipe right on the screen and select an exact playlist or section (rather than the multiple taps and hunting you have to do in Apple Music).

This is made easier by a swipe-and-hold gesture, which allows you to swipe and move your finger up and down to quickly jump between sections.

The app is also big on drag and drop in a way that Apple seems to have forgotten about. Pick up any item and you’ll see the Now Playing box turn into a drop interface, allowing you to queue it via the up next or later option, or add it to a playlist. This makes building and rearranging playlists from your iPhone a much faster and more pleasant experience.

Outside of this, Marvis Pro seems to make slightly better use of the space available. You can see more information at once, since there’s a lot less blank space. There’s a details screen for each track or release that includes information like release date, how long you’ve spent listening to it, or which songs are suggested if you create a radio station from it.

Visually, everything is a little denser and more pleasing to use. Track lists expand and wiggle dynamically into place, and the Now Playing box at the bottom of the screen can be minimized into a small square in the corner.

Love Customization? You’ll Love Marvis

All of this feels like an improvement on the way Apple’s Music app works, but where the app really shines is in its customization. The app lets you change almost anything you like about the Music experience, from selecting between grid and list views when browsing your library, to customizing themes, accent colors, gestures, and more.

The Home screen is completely customizable, allowing you to rearrange, hide, and label sections like the personal Recently Played or Top Rated, and Apple Music sections like Radio and Top Charts.

Being able to set up your own Home screen is a game changer if you’re not fond of what Apple is dishing out (especially pre-iOS 26, where customization is nil). On top of this, you can create multiple Home screens—one for listening in the gym, another for your classical music tastes, maybe another for parties.

Add a search term to your home screen that looks for specific albums, tracks, or playlists. Add smart rules to filter, limit, and sort the results. Choose between the wider Apple Music catalog or your own personal library. Add a tab just for recently played songs, or just add recently played songs to your existing Home screen.

There’s widget support within Marvis Pro too, with three different sizes of widgets to highlight what’s currently playing or showcase a particular section. Want a widget that shows you the last few albums you’ve added to your library and lets you play them with a single tap? Marvis can do that.

Marvis Pro lets you hone in on the features that you find yourself using a lot, that might take several taps to find within the standard Apple Music interface. Worse still, Apple’s tendency to surface and hide sections at will can make the experience unpredictable. Marvis ultimately gives you better control over a service you’re already paying for.

Should You Buy Marvis Pro?

Unfortunately, Marvis Pro isn’t perfect (though this isn’t necessarily the developer’s fault). You lose access to a few Apple Music features if you choose to use Marvis Pro instead, notably the ability to delete music from your library or playlists. You’ll have to open Music to do this.

You also lose access to Apple Music’s lyrics on the Now Playing screen, with Marvis Pro instead including built-in support for the premium Musixmatch app. You also don’t get access to Apple Music Sing, a volume slider that lets you remove the vocals from a track.

There’s no way to set Marvis Pro as your default media player, so tapping the Now Playing widget that appears on your lock screen will open Apple’s Music app instead. The “Up Next” integration is a bit wonky, so you can’t edit the queue from the Now Playing screen in Marvis Pro (again, because of Apple Music’s restrictions).

Despite this, Marvis Pro does a lot of cool stuff, especially if you’re looking for new ways to browse and interact with your library. It’s a no-brainer if you’re looking for a way to scrobble your listening habits to Last.fm. It’s an app that lets you do so much more with the Apple Music framework, especially if you consider yourself a power user who is happy to take the time to set up the app just so.

If you use your iPhone to build playlists, Marvis Pro will make your life easier. If you’re queuing up music on the fly for a party, dragging and dropping tracks from your library onto the mini-player is much faster. If you’re tired of the Music app’s interface and wish you could pin certain sections and highlights to a tab of your choosing, Marvis Pro is the solution.

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Though Marvis Pro costs $10, it still feels like remarkably good value for such a well-made app. It’s also refreshing, in an era of subscriptions and ad-supported revenue models, to be able to pay a fair chunk of change for an app that you get to keep forever. The app also has an active community with an engaged developer over at r/MarvisApp.

Fortunately, I think there’s room for both Marvis Pro and Apple’s Music app in my life.