Cider

Cider 1 is a cross-platform Apple Music client for desktop computers, built by a small independent development team. It lets you play music from your Apple Music subscription on Windows, Linux, and macOS using an app that is separate from Apple's own software. The project was released as open source and grew a following among users who preferred its interface or wanted an alternative to the official clients.

Under the hood, Cider 1 was built using Electron.js, a framework that packages a web application into a standalone desktop program. The user interface was written with Vue.js 2, and Webpack was used to bundle everything together. This stack is common for teams building cross-platform desktop tools without writing separate native code for each operating system.

The project is now archived. The development team stopped issuing updates and closed first-party distribution of compiled builds, citing the volume of support requests that came in for this older version. A successor, Cider v2, is available through the team's website and is the version they actively develop and support. If you want to run Cider 1, you would need to compile it from source yourself using instructions in the legacy documentation, but the team will not help with that process.

This repository exists as a historical record of the v1 codebase. The README is brief and the project is in a maintenance-free state, so the code here is the primary artifact. Anyone interested in how an Electron and Vue.js music client was structured can read through it freely.