The biggest update since the relaunch. Breathe gets a completely new audio engine and learns to work with your music.
Your music during meditation
Many of you asked for this: keep Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube playing while you meditate. Now you can.
Start your playlist, open Breathe, and choose “Own Music” as your background sound — available with Breathe Premium. Breathe handles the timer, the bells, and your progress — your music keeps playing.
Before starting, Breathe detects whether music is already playing and asks how you want to continue. No more accidentally stopping your playlist. And if you start Spotify during a meditation, Breathe notices and pauses with a quick overlay.
Phone calls are handled separately — after the call, your meditation continues automatically.
New audio engine for iOS
Under the hood, I’ve completely rebuilt audio playback on iOS. This was long overdue.
The result: background sounds and bells now run reliably, even with a locked screen. The start bell plays completely before the background sound kicks in. Sounds loop with a smooth crossfade — no gaps, no glitches. And if your phone goes into deep sleep, a local notification fires as a fallback for the bell.
This is the foundation for everything audio-related going forward.
Statistics improvements
The year view now has a monthly badge bar for filtering. A bug that showed wrong values when paginating through months and years has been fixed. And a layout overflow with large values no longer freezes the screen.
Bug fixes
- ErrorBoundary crash outside ThemeProvider — fixed
- iOS: SystemVolumeSlider disabled (interfered with background audio)
- Android: accessibility tabbar crash — fixed
- Android: silence keepalive crash on some devices — fixed
What’s next
This update was mostly about getting the audio foundation right. Solid background playback, music coexistence, streaming — all the pieces that need to work perfectly before I can build on top of them.
Just breathe.
— Johannes
