PlayScreen
A now playing display for WiiM streamers. Point a spare iPad at your WiiM and it shows the album art, the track, and the bit depth and sample rate your streamer reports. When nothing is playing it shows a clock.
Free, with no adverts, no subscriptions and no account.
Getting started
Put the iPad on the same Wi-Fi network as your WiiM. Open PlayScreen. It searches your network and your streamer should appear within a second or two. Tap it. That is the whole setup. If you would rather type the address, choose Enter IP address manually, which is on the same screen. You will find the address in the WiiM Home app under your device’s settings.
Using it
Tap anywhere to play or pause. Press and hold, or tap the button beside the quality badge, to open settings. There are no other controls, which is deliberate: it is meant to be looked at rather than operated.
If it cannot find your streamer
Check you allowed local network access. PlayScreen asks once, on first launch. If it was dismissed, iOS gives no second prompt and the app cannot tell the difference between permission being refused and there being nothing to find. Turn it back on in Settings, Privacy and Security, Local Network, PlayScreen. Check both are on the same network. A guest network, or a router with two separate bands that do not talk to each other, will hide the streamer. Try the address directly. Enter IP address manually rules out discovery entirely.
Why did the artwork turn into a clock?
Switching a WiiM off puts it into standby rather than turning it off. It stays on the network and keeps reporting the last track as paused, indefinitely. So after five minutes with nothing playing, PlayScreen falls back to the clock. Press play and the artwork comes straight back.
Which streamers work?
Any WiiM streamer that offers the standard local API. Built and tested against a WiiM Pro Plus.
Contact
Email hi@tomhargreav.es. Product feedback and feature requests are welcome and genuinely get read.
Privacy
PlayScreen collects nothing.
No accounts, no sign in, no analytics, no advertising, no tracking, no crash reporting, no identifiers. Nothing about you or your listening leaves your device, because there is nowhere for it to go: PlayScreen has no server and no backend of any kind.
The one permission
PlayScreen asks for local network access, once. It needs this to find your streamer on your own Wi-Fi and to talk to it afterwards. It is the only permission the app will ever request.
Microphone
There is none. PlayScreen contains no audio capture code at all, and it does not appear in the app’s permissions because it is not there to appear.
Network connections
For completeness, PlayScreen makes exactly three kinds of network request, all of them started by the app on your device and none of them routed through us: to your streamer, on your local network, to ask what is playing; to the other addresses on your local network, once, while searching for your streamer; and to whatever address your streamer reports for the current album art. Depending on what you are listening to, that may be your streamer itself or it may be a music service’s artwork server, in which case that service sees an ordinary request for an image, as it would from any player. Album art is held in memory for the current track only and is never written to disk.
Your settings
Your chosen streamer, the clock format and the keep awake preference are stored on your own device and nowhere else. Deleting the app removes them.
Contact
Email hi@tomhargreav.es
Last updated 01/09/2026