Taylor Swift fans love this app to follow the All Things Eras Tour

Thanks to fan-supported livestreams of Taylor Swift’s hit Eras Tour, Swifties everywhere are attending the singer’s shows over and over again without having to empty their wallets on travel and tickets. But with Eras shows bouncing between cities and continents, it can be (ahem) difficult to keep track of start times.

That’s where Swift Alert comes in. The free, fan-run app, available for iPhones and Android devices, uses a phone’s settings to calculate exactly when concerts thousands of miles away start in a user’s time zone. The app then sends real-time notifications so Swift’s loyal fans can tune in to live streams. It notifies fans when hits from every era of her 17-year career begin, and when to expect the highly anticipated acoustic set of surprise songs that Swift plays every night.

Let’s face it. Not all Swifties have three-plus hours a day to devote to another full Eras Tour show. Swift Alert makes it easier to balance being Swift with more tedious tasks like school, work, and sleep.

According to the app’s founder and developer Kyle Mumma, Swift Alert has been downloaded more than 800,000 times worldwide since its launch in August 2023 and is ranked 67th among the best free entertainment apps in the App Store at the time of this writing. (Many of the app’s features, such as the news feed and calendar, are free. A one-time all-access fee of $1.99 unlocks the live push notifications during the show, as well as the outfit and surprise song tracker.)

“It’s a perfect mix of information and fun,” wrote one App Store reviewer. “I can’t express how many times their push notifications for concert times have saved me from missing surprise songs.”

In addition to notifications about show start times and highly anticipated moments, the app also includes quizzes and a curated news feed that aggregates social media updates from Taylor Swift’s official social media accounts and some of the Grammy winner’s biggest fans. A popular in-app game called Mastermind earns points for correctly predicting the specifics of a particular show, like what colors Swift will wear during her 1989 performance or whether the guitar she uses for “Lover” will be pink, blue or purple. Players at the top of the leaderboard win prizes, specifically for Swift, of course.

Mastermind usage has skyrocketed during the band’s current 18-city European tour. On Tuesday, 288,000 people played live at the show in Zurich, according to Mumma, a 34-year-old who describes himself as a “huge Swiftie” and grew up with her music. When he’s not making sure other Swift fans stay up to date with the Eras Tour livestreams, he works full time as a product manager for a sports technology company.

Mama and his Swift-loving wife Mia, both graduates of Duke University’s business school, came up with the idea for Swift Alert after attending the opening concert of the Eras Tour in Glendale, Arizona, in March 2023. Afterward, when they watched several livestreams of other Eras Tour concerts, they noticed a lot of confusion in the chat.

“We saw a lot of people panicking, like, ‘How am I supposed to know when the surprise songs start when she’s playing in Warsaw? I have no idea what time it is in Warsaw,'” Mumma, who lives in Durham, North Carolina, said in an interview. “The first version of the app was really just to help solve that problem.”

The app went live in time for the Eras Tour in Mexico City and continues to be updated to respond to user feedback, which comes in the hundreds of thousands, Mumma said. How does Swift Alert work and what will happen to it when the Eras Tour ends? Your questions will be answered here.

How does Swift Alert work?

The calendar feature allows users to select the shows they want to follow from a list of upcoming events, with start times automatically converted to the user’s time zone. For example, if you want to see the first of three concerts in Gelsenkirchen, tap that show and it will immediately appear in a countdown box on the home screen, telling you how many days, hours, and minutes you have to wait until you can hear your favorite singer “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault)” live again.

A member of the four-person app team – three in the US and one, the app developer, in Turkey – monitors each live stream and manually sends live notifications while a show is in progress.

“We’ve found that the concerts vary very little from night to night,” Mumma said. “That’s one of the reasons why it’s so attractive for people to watch it dozens of times.”

Minor deviations, such as the length of the surprise song or longer than usual standing ovations, also mean that the app’s initial automatic alerts can arrive late. That’s why the team decided to put a human at the controls.

“If we’re two minutes or even 30 seconds late in notifying people about the surprise songs and people get that notification and go to the live stream and the first song is already over, then we’re not fulfilling our fundamental value proposition.”

What do fans say about the app?

In short, they love it. It has been reviewed more than 15,000 times on the App Store, receiving a rating of 4.9 out of 5. It also has a rating of 4.9 on Google Play, where it has received more than 6,700 exclamation-point-filled reviews.

Some fans have complained about occasional glitches and the premium fees, but most are happy to pay a few extra dollars, especially for an app built by Swifties for Swifties.

“Anyone who uses this app can see how much love and effort went into its development,” wrote one App Store reviewer. “And the decision to pay a small amount for the premium version of the app was an easy one. Not only because it supports the developers of the app, but also because it unlocks additional features.”

What happens to Swift Alert after eras?

The app is geared toward the Eras Tour, and Mumma doesn’t yet know what will become of it when the Eras Tour ends in Vancouver on Dec. 8, but conversations are ongoing. “We have a super engaged community,” he said. “Since launch, user feedback has pretty much dictated our entire roadmap and will continue to dictate what we build.”