The app
Everything they need, downloaded before they leave home.
Festival Buddy is a free app for iPhone and Android. It holds your whole festival: every act, stage, set time, map and FAQ. Once loaded it needs no signal, which matters in a field with one bar.
Grid, portrait
My Lineup with a clash warning
On Now
Grid, landscape
Artist pane
Works with no signal
The lineup, artwork, write-ups, maps and FAQ download the first time the app opens. After that nothing on site needs a connection. When there is a signal, the app quietly checks for changes and picks up anything you have published. When there is not, it carries on with what it has.
The grid schedule
Every stage and every time on one screen, portrait or landscape. Acts in your lineup are highlighted, and rated acts are colour-coded, so the family can see at a glance who overlaps with whom. There is a By Stage list for people who prefer to scroll, and On Now for the moment you leave the tent.
Artist write-ups
Every act has a page: artwork, genre, a short write-up and links to Apple Music and Spotify. People used them to decide what to see, and to introduce friends and family to acts they did not know.
“The link to Spotify was fantastic as we could listen to artists songs we didn't know.”
My Lineup with a clash warning
Your own lineup, with clash warnings
Add an act to My Lineup and it goes on your own timeline. If it overlaps with something already there, the app says so straight away. Activities can go in too. Friends can share lineups with each other, so the group can see who is heading where.
“Really helpful way to check who was on and loved the clashes pop up when you added something to your lineup”
Also in the box
What’s next
Straight from the people who used it.
Everything below was asked for, unprompted, in the survey. In roughly this order:
- Reminders that are easier to find. The app already reminds you before an act in your lineup, but the most-requested feature in the survey was reminders, so not enough people found them.
- Booking activities from inside the app. "I always forget to book an activity."
- A short first-run tour. So nobody misses what the app does, including the second way to rate.
- Consistent grid ordering, and no forced rotation. The grid sometimes opened alphabetical, sometimes by stage size.
- Food vendors and live weather. A vendor list to plan ahead of the queues; a weather update.
- More stages and areas covered. Smaller stages and side areas that were not on the bill we had.
- Fix: friends' names auto-filling into the ID field. A bug in the Friends flow.
“Notify me half an hour before my starred act is on (if it already does then apologies that i missed that)”
What it will not do
No adverts, no advertising SDKs, no cross-app tracking, no location. People asked for that in the survey and the privacy policy already promises it. Organisers see aggregate counts and averages, never names. Privacy.
Two ways to get it
Going to a festival? It is free. Running one? Let’s talk.