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The iOS Companion lets you browse Gridshift projects, saved versions, and comments from your iPhone or iPad. It reads a small summary the Mac publishes for each project — never the full .gsp bundle — so the list loads artwork, tempo, track counts, and version previews in a few hundred kilobytes instead of the gigabytes of audio a full download would cost.
Don’t have the app yet? On the Mac, choose Help → Install Gridshift for iOS… to open the TestFlight invite.

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Requirements

  • iPhone or iPad running iOS / iPadOS 18.0 or later
  • The same Apple ID as your Mac, with iCloud Drive enabled
  • Gridshift on macOS saving projects into the shared Gridshift iCloud container
  • At least one saved version with a bounce preview if you want instant playback from the project list

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Browse the project list

Projects are grouped into horizontal carousels by collection — the groups you create on the Mac — plus an Unsorted section for anything not filed yet. Pull to refresh rescans iCloud, and if iCloud is unavailable the companion shows an explicit unavailable state instead of a stale local cache. Tap a project cover to control browsing playback: You can also drag a project card into a different collection to file it there — both platforms read and write the same catalog.

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Mini player bar

The mini player appears at the bottom of the project list after you select a project. It includes:
  • project artwork thumbnail
  • elapsed time / total time while a bounce is active
  • a play/pause control
Tap the mini player bar to expand into the full-screen player. Tap the project artwork in the list to pause/resume or switch playback. If the selected project has no active bounce preview yet, the bar stays visible and shows the project’s BPM until a playable version is available.

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Full-screen player

Expanding the mini player opens a full-screen player with:
  • a large artwork header with project name, tempo, and description
  • a Versions button that opens a panel of saved version previews and bounce playback
  • a Comment button that opens a panel of existing comments, with a field to add a new one
Bounce previews download from iCloud on demand. While a preview file is still being fetched, the mini player switches to a Downloading… state and starts playback automatically once the file becomes local.

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Comments

A comment left from the phone captures the exact playing position the moment you open the composer field — the version and the second within it — so it reads back as a specific moment in the music, not just a note. The Mac shows the same comment with a time chip naming that version and position. Comments without a captured position are notes about the project as a whole. Either kind can be checked off or deleted from either device.

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Remove a project from a collection

Long-press a project card to open a context menu with an artwork preview. Inside a collection, choose Remove from [Collection] to unfile it — the project moves back to Unsorted, and nothing about the project itself changes.
The companion can’t delete a project. Deleting a project is macOS-only, from the Project Overview.

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How iCloud storage works

The companion app is designed around iCloud-backed projects:
  • the project list comes from the CloudKit projection the Mac publishes — a handful of small records, cached on the device — not a scan of the .gsp bundles themselves
  • if CloudKit sync has never run for a given Mac, the companion falls back to scanning manifest.json directly out of the project bundles in iCloud Drive, and bundles saved before manifests existed fall back further, to project.json
  • version bounces download on demand when playback starts, not up front
  • comment edits made on the phone are proposals: they sync as CloudKit records, but the Mac is the one that merges them into the shared list per comment by last-writer-wins and publishes the merged result back, so both devices converge on one order
For more about the shared storage layout, see iCloud Integration.
Last modified on August 17, 2026