Show HN: I built a simple ambient sound app with no ads or subscriptions

ambisounds.app

41 points by alpaca121 7 hours ago


I’ve always liked having background noise while working or falling asleep, but I got frustrated that most “white noise” or ambient sound apps are either paywalled, stuffed with ads, or try to upsell subscriptions for basic features.

So I made Ambi, a small iOS app with a clean interface and a set of freely available ambient sounds — rain, waves, wind, birds, that sort of thing. You can mix them, adjust volume levels, and just let it play all night or while you work. Everything works offline and there are no hidden catches.

It’s something I built for myself first, but I figured others might find it useful too. Feedback, bugs, and suggestions are all welcome.

https://apps.apple.com/app/ambi-white-noise-sleep-sounds/id6...

mft_ - 32 minutes ago

Thanks for this - de-installed an alternative and installed this.

Any thoughts of some sort of equalizer feature? I like brown noise for sleeping in noisy environments, and would love to be able to add a bit more bass to your sample. (Brown noise plus some Airplane is actually pretty good.)

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Side thought - there needs to be a club (with a curated list?) for simple apps that work well, and commit to staying ad-free. I'd love to be able to search amongst such apps prior to auditioning options from the App Store. (I mean, it would be great to be able to filter for such apps in the App Store itself, but that's not going to happen.)

saaaaaam - 22 minutes ago

Downloaded this. It drowned out perfectly the noise from my upstairs neighbour sitting on her balcony watching YouTube videos above my open bedroom window. Thank you!

monitron - 2 hours ago

This is fantastic, thank you. Recently when trying to sleep away from home, I went looking for a noise app and was grossed out by the state of the available apps, just like you said.

BTW One unfortunate feature that many noise apps/websites have (including Apple Music's official noise buttons) is that after a few minutes, they fade out and back in or have some other jarring transition when repeating. This is far from ideal for sleep, meditation, etc. So this is an enhancement request, if your app doesn't already solve this ;)

I'm also curious: do you think that the cost of maintaining the app (keeping it up to date with newer iOS versions, for instance) will eventually dissuade you from keeping it available in its pristine state? I've wondered why there seem to be ZERO free apps by hobbyists on the App Store in categories like this...

caseyf7 - 21 minutes ago

This is great. I’ve been looking for something like this for a long time after giving up on Portal. Thank you

ssttoo - 34 minutes ago

Lovely! Couple questions…

- where did you get the noises, are they your own recordings?

- how hard it is to support earlier iOS? For folks like me who are on older phones that cannot be upgraded anymore (iOS 16 personally)

mandeepj - an hour ago

Just downloaded! Thanks for your efforts on it.

I was thinking of building something similar to the point of even learning music production, for the similar reasons you have listed. I think I can postpone my idea now.

I don’t think many people would mind watching once a day ad just to support your work. But, whatever makes you happy.

andy_ppp - an hour ago

Wow this looks incredible! I quite like the Overcast model where you can optionally pay a little just to support the author rather than for extra features or nagware.

sudo712 - 2 hours ago

I love the idea, and thanks for doing this. I would like to create free apps too just for the heck of it but one of the biggest issues I find with creating free app store apps is that, regardless of whether you are charging money or not, you need to keep feeding Apple $100 per year, which is excruciating, especially for countries where the developer population is much higher and the income disparity is high. Since the Play Store only charges 25$ ish and one time, it is much more feasible to do it on the Play Store, hence the availability of such apps is more on Play Store.

- 7 hours ago
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