Play Dead User Reviews

Customer Experience

Positive experience62.9% of reviews
Neutral17.1% of reviews
Negative experience20.0% of reviews

~ Based on 35 written reviews from the US App Store.

Is Play Dead Safe?

Play Dead: Grateful Dead App appears mostly safe based on user ratings. AppsHunter Safety Score for Play Dead is 84/100.

This assessment is based on 74 user ratings, with an App Store average of 4.4/5.

Safety Analysis

83.8% of ratings point to a safe experience
6.8% of ratings suggest some concerns
9.5% of ratings point to a risky experience

~ Based on 74 App Store ratings for Play Dead.

Is Play Dead Legit?

Play Dead: Grateful Dead App appears legitimate, with a few gaps. AppsHunter Legitimacy Score for Play Dead is 75/100.

Based on 75 of 100 points across 7 verification signals from App Store and developer data.

Top reviews

Content Great App needs work

The content and quality are great. The app is very buggy. I’ve had it for five days and it has froze up six times. Need to restart phone to get it working. Now I get an error that says ‘Something went wrong’. Restarted phone and it just spins. Support is virtually non existent.

Response from developer

Sorry for the trouble you're having. Please contact us on help.playdead.app if you continue having problems. We provide email support 365 days a year.

I really love the new search options

Endless entertainment.

Response from developer

Thanks for taking the time to leave a review and for your feedback. Contact us on help.playdead.app if you have any questions or problems. Enjoy the tunes!

Fantastic app with wonderful quality

The latest update for mid July 2026 gave all the app UI tweaks that were missing. As a developer I love how the app is navigated. Much better than Nugs. Good job!

Response from developer

Thanks for taking the time to leave a review and for your feedback. Contact us on help.playdead.app if you have any questions or problems. Enjoy the tunes!

This is the best thing since sliced bread

Kudos as it picked up my complex password from Password / iCloud right away. So now I can run PlayDead and Nugs from one account on AppleTV, iPhone, iPad, MacBook whatever, they got it all to work in the garden the way it should!

FINALLY

I’ve been waiting 16 years for this since I first got on the bus after seeing Furthur at All Good 2010. My only complaint is that the chromecast option is hit or miss, 9/10 miss.

I want to love this app

The Grateful Dead have been arguably the biggest influence in my life. I saw Jerry play 290 times between GD & JGB. I’ve actually fought p people for talking smack about the band. I was really excited to hear about this app coming out. I was a little reluctant to get it just because I’ve had Apple Music for a long time and really don’t need anything else. I could get any GD release there and for any bootlegs go to archive.org. I got it anyway just because it’s an official GD release and I always want to support GD.

So, I open the app and see that I can search by year and download everything. I’m immediately disappointed to find some years are nowhere near complete. For instance ‘94 only has 9 shows. Also some shows are incomplete. The final show 7-9-85 only has Standing On The Moon. Very disappointing. Then a really big disappointment was that they don’t include the lyrics with any song. Apple Music gives the option of scrolling lyricswith every song so it can’t be that hard, especially when they’re your songs and lyrics. I’m gonna keep it for a few months and I’ll update my review monthly. Hopefully it’ll get better.
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Loving Playdead but…

When will blusound and other streaming services add natively so we can enjoy the high rez in all its glory. I assume not entirely in your control but how about a nudge

Rewind

Amazing app! It would help to have a 5 second rewind feature so musicians can listen back to specific parts.

The tuesday drops are godsend! Latest releases have been focused a lot on 89. More mid 80s please! 85!!! Would

Excellent app!

Great App! When is the iPadOS version coming out?

Got To Get It

Its just awesome to be able to hear so many great concerts, in very good resolution- if your a Dead fan just get it

Let us share shows!

One thing that would be great is the ability to share a show or a track to the web or social media, capped to a couple shows a week or something like that. I want to share the joy!

Response from developer

Thanks for taking the time to leave a review. Contact us on help.playdead.app if you have any questions or problems. Enjoy the tunes!

Fantastic. Dead forever.

Just downloaded the app this week and I’m loving it. Such a great selection of music and I’ll be sure to check out the new drops as they come. Would love to hear the summer 1970 Festival Express shows.

Response from developer

Thanks for taking the time to leave a review. Contact us on help.playdead.app if you have any questions or problems. Enjoy the tunes!

Amazing sound everywhere all of the time

As a collector who has a lot of HD recordings and a good standalone DAC, these recordings surpass anything I’ve ever heard. The thing is, listening through wired Apple earbuds really blows me away, as well as through my car stereo via usb. Having everything streamable and perfectly organized and available without me having to do anything is great.
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Response from developer

Thanks for taking the time to leave a review. Contact us on help.playdead.app if you have any questions or problems. Enjoy the tunes!

Constant ipad 6th gen crashing via airplay 2

Title. Constant crashing from ipad via airplay 2 to bluesound node 130.

Doesn’t work on DAPs

Was so excited when this first came out I bought the yearly subscription right away. I planned on using on a HiBy hi-res Android DAP. Found out the hard way it doesn’t work on Open Android and never will. It does work on iPhone but iPhone doesn’t support the full Hi-Res audio features available. I paid upfront for a year subscription to a service that I was really excited about but can’t use on the device I use for playing music.
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Great Music, app OK

The sound quality and music selection are worth it to me currently plus the two new drops a week. Sure, I could use Relisten and try to find the best recordings and all that but fortunately I can pay and help get more released from the Vault.

There’s some other good requests/suggestions on the playdeadapp subreddit but two I’d like to highlight:

1) This day in dead history function/page. Sure, we can search but the search is a bit lacking.

2) Random show/album.

Also, we should be able to search for other people’s playlists and not just the handful that were curated by the developers.

Thanks for all you’ve done and all that will continue to happen!
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Response from developer

Thanks for taking the time to leave a review and for your feedback. Contact us on help.playdead.app if you have any questions or problems. Enjoy the tunes!

Excellent Sound and Organization

When will it be able to work on Sonos? Thanks.

Response from developer

Thanks for taking the time to leave a review and for your feedback. We do not have a timeline on Sonos integration at this time. Contact us on help.playdead.app if you have any questions or problems. Enjoy the tunes!

Great app, getting better

I wish there was everything available on Nugs or Spotify or Apple Music on here, even if not in hifi. I wish I could rate each show and mark as played. I wish the cassette UI included shelves for collections like road trips, Dave’s picks, Dick’s picks, etc….

BUT this app is getting better every week, and I truly feel like it’ll be my only music service once it’s reached its full catalog potential, and it’s my favorite interface of any app, music or otherwise.
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Pretty good. Wish the album artwork was bigger.

Wish the artwork was bigger…especially if the “tape” covers could just be cd artwork. That would be awesome. So we could actually see the artwork.

Response from developer

Thanks for taking the time to leave a review and for your feedback. Contact us on help.playdead.app if you have any questions or problems. Enjoy the tunes!

Money

No subscription = no music. Nothing is free at all. Only thing it’s semi useful for is to look up a date, a song , a show, which is already available for free in many other places. Certain people probably rolling over in their eternal slumber that their free music is not so free. 99$ a year 10$ a month. Whatever. Won’t shed a tear if it loses money
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