iPhone

No Meringo for iPhone. We couldn't hand you the receipt.

People ask when the iPhone version is coming. It isn't, and the reason is not effort or taste. Meringo exists to do one thing other players only describe: it hashes the bytes it sent to your DAC and gives you the number, so you can check it with tools we don't control. On an iPhone an app is not allowed to be the thing that sends those bytes. With nothing to hash there is no receipt, and without the receipt it would be a different product wearing this one's name.

What the receipt is

On Android, plugging in a USB DAC takes Meringo off the system audio road entirely. It parses the DAC's USB Audio Class descriptors, claims the audio-streaming interface, and ships PCM frames through isochronous transfers straight to the DAC's USB endpoint. Because Meringo is the code doing the shipping, it can write down every byte it hands to that pipe and compute a SHA-256 over the whole stream. Then it re-decodes the same file, lays the PCM out in the identical format, and hashes that. Matching hashes mean nothing touched a single bit between the file and the pipe.

The method is published at meringo.app/verify, with a public-domain checker script that shares no code with the app. The captures so far are in the registry.

What Apple allows

A developer asked Apple this question directly in September 2025: can we write a USB driver for an iPhone? The reply came from an Apple engineer in Developer Technical Support, and it is short enough to read whole.

Correct. DriverKit is not supported on iOS.

MFi-licensed accessories can communicate with applications on iOS; however, that communication is through an MFi-licensed protocol (“iAP2”). General USB communication is not possible, even through the MFi program.

Both from “iOS alternatives to DriverKit”, Apple Developer Forums · read 2026-09-19

That settles it for a receipt. A receipt is a hash taken by whatever ships the bytes. An app that cannot open the USB device cannot be what ships them. It hands its audio to the system, and the system does the rest.

What an iPhone player can tell you, and what it can't show you

It can ask: Apple's audio session API has a call that, in Apple's words, “requests a change to the input and output audio sample rate.” A request is what it is.
It can read back: The same documentation says “to see the effect of this change, use the sampleRate property.” So a player can print the rate the system reports.
It can describe itself: Whether its own EQ is on, whether it applied its own gain, what it decoded.
It can't show you the bytes: Nothing above is a record of what crossed the cable. It is a player telling you what it asked for.

Quoted from AVAudioSession.setPreferredSampleRate, Apple Developer Documentation · read 2026-09-19

We looked in September 2026 and did not find an iPhone player that publishes a hash of its output for you to check. If one exists, write to us and this paragraph changes.

What this page does not say

It does not say an iPhone sounds worse. We have no measurement that says so and we would not print one if we did; a hash is about identity, never about sound. It says nothing about any other app.

And it is about iPhone only. Apple's documentation says “DriverKit on iPadOS requires an iPad with an M-series chip” and lists AudioDriverKit among the supported frameworks. We have built nothing there and tested nothing there, so we claim nothing about it. If that ever turns into a way to capture what was sent, this page will say so.

What to do instead

The modern iPod is a DAP, not an iPhone. If what you miss is a device that holds your music and does nothing else, that device exists again, and it runs Android. Meringo was built on one and is tuned for it (the homepage names the device), and it runs on anything with Android 13 or later.

Or an Android phone with a USB DAC or dongle. That is the chain the receipts in the registry were captured on: three DACs so far, and that is the whole list. If your DAC is not on it we do not know that it runs bit-perfect and we will not say that it does.

Your files come with you. Meringo plays local FLAC and ALAC. ALAC is Apple Lossless, so a library ripped that way on a Mac moves across as it is: copy the folders to a card or to the device, point Meringo at them, and the library builds itself. It also plays from Jellyfin and the Subsonic and OpenSubsonic family if your music already lives on a server.

If you are staying on iPhone, ask of any player what you would ask of us: what did you send, and how can I check? “We requested the file's rate” is an honest answer. A badge with nothing behind it is not an answer at all.

When this is the wrong page for you

If you mainly stream from Spotify, Tidal or Qobuz, Meringo isn't your player on any phone. There is no native integration with commercial streaming, by design. It is $9.99 once, with a 7-day full trial and no subscription.

Tell us

If you carry an iPhone and would want to hear that this page has changed, write to support@meringo.app with the subject “iPhone version”, and tell us what you play music with today.