Lyrics everyone in the room sees in real time

Group Sing Along lets one person pick a song and opens its lyrics on every phone in the room. I designed and built it for family sing-alongs, where not everyone knows the words and there are never enough songbooks.

Anyone can join with a 4-letter code, with no account and nothing to download. It’s been live at groupsingalong.com since January 2025, and in December 2025 I built an iOS version.

Role

Design and build, solo

Timeline

December 2024 to January 2026

Platforms

Web app (live), iOS app (built, not released)

I wrote the problem down before I built anything: “In large group gatherings, like family sing-alongs, not everyone knows the lyrics to the songs and physical songbooks are often insufficient in number or outdated.” The usual fixes are passing 1 phone around or printing lyric sheets.

A sing-along room has 4 things a design has to handle:

• Every age

  Sing-alongs mix every age, so there’s nothing to sign up for or install.

• One leader

  Someone has to pick the song, or every phone ends up on a different one.

• People arrive late

  Someone who joins halfway through should land on the song that’s already playing.

• Small screens

  People are singing, not reading, so each phone needs its own text size.

The person who creates the group is the host. They search for a song, tap it, and every phone in the room opens the same lyrics. At first, singers only saw the lyrics and their own text size buttons. When a new phone joins, it asks the host’s phone for the current song, so late joiners never wait for the next one. The demo at the top is the January 2025 room, rebuilt from its code.

Joining: a code, a link or a QR code

Group codes started at 5 letters. I cut them to 4 on January 12, 2025, and later made them work in any case. The host shares from 1 screen with 2 ways in: a text with the link, and a QR code for people in the same room. In the first version the QR code was big and the message button was small. Later that month I made them 2 equal targets.

The room, 4 versions

The first room was a plain page; my commit called it “UI option 1.” By the end of January it was a card with a violet header, album art and − / + text size on every phone. In March 2025 the header started showing how many people were in the room, and a row told you whether you were the host. I also renamed the “conductor” to the “host” so the word matched everywhere.

Song requests

In December 2025 I let singers ask for songs without taking control. They search and tap Request. The host gets 1 list, with repeats merged into “Requested 3x,” and taps Accept to play one. A confirmation screen replaced the browser alert that used to say a request was sent.

Lyrics moved off the page

In January 2026 the lyrics stopped being text in the app. On the web, each phone now opens the song’s page on a lyrics site, in a window that opens by itself when the host changes songs. On iOS it opens in Safari’s Reader view.

The first landing page was the name and 2 buttons. In March 2025 I redesigned it to explain the idea before asking anyone to start a group: a serif headline, Create and Join side by side, and a sample lyrics card. The card is an illustration; the app shows the whole song, not 1 highlighted line.

January 7, 2025

January 30, 2025

March 28, 2025

In December 2025 I built an iOS version in Expo that joins the same rooms as the web app, so iPhones and browsers can sing together. Free rooms hold 3 people. Plus holds 10 for $1.99 a month or $20 a year, and Party and a 24-hour Event Pass hold 25. Only the host pays, and everyone else joins free.

2 details are about real rooms. Text size scales the whole screen from 0.625× to 2×, not just the lyrics. And when the host’s phone goes to the background for a screenshot or a text, the room waits 10 seconds before ending, so nobody else loses the song.

The first version took about 2 weeks: my first commit was December 27, 2024, and search worked in production on January 6, 2025. It has been live ever since, and it became an installable web app in February 2025.

This was the first thing I built for people in the same room. The hardest problem was people who joined mid-song and saw nothing until the host picked the next one. The fix was a small handshake: a new phone says hello, and the host’s phone sends the current song.

It also taught me to design for the people who aren’t in charge. Most of the room never touches search, so their screen has 1 job: show the words big enough to sing.