How to Add a Spotify Wrapped-Style Year in Review to Your App

The quickest way to add a Spotify Wrapped-style feature to your app is to build it as personalized in-app stories: 6–10 full-screen slides that pull each user’s own numbers into a ready-made template and end with a shareable card. With a stories SDK that supports placeholders, developers pass the data once, and marketers design and launch the recap without a new screen or an app release.

Below: why Wrapped works, which apps outside music run their own version, what your app can recap, three ways to build it, and a step-by-step plan for a December launch.

Why Spotify Wrapped works

Wrapped 2025 went live on December 3, 2025. Within 24 hours, more than 200 million users viewed at least one story, 19% more than the year before, and the recap was shared over 500 million times (TechCrunch).

• It’s about the user, not the brand. Every slide is “you”: your top artist, your minutes, your listening age.
• It’s built as stories. Full-screen, tap-through, one fact per slide — a format people already know from social apps.
• It ends with something to share. The final card is made for social feeds, so users do the distribution.
• It happens once a year. People wait for it and open the app on launch day.

For a breakdown of all 60 screens of Wrapped 2025 and how it compares to 2024, download our case study Why Spotify Wrapped Is Successful.

An InAppStory example: HomeExchange

At the end of 2024, the home-swapping platform HomeExchange ran a Wrapped-style “Year in Review” in in-app stories, with separate recaps for hosts and travelers, exchange stats, location highlights and shareable messages in five languages. The campaign reached 26,000+ users, with a 66.9% open rate and 100% story completion. Read the HomeExchange case.

Not only music: who else runs a year in review

• Duolingo Year in Review: lessons completed, streaks and minutes learned. Users get a prompt when they open the app.
• Year in Monzo: the year’s spending highlights. Before it starts, users choose a “nice” or “savage” tone.
• Apple Music Replay and YouTube Recap: top songs, artists and watch history, right inside the apps.

The pattern works wherever users build up data over a year: money, orders, workouts, trips, minutes.

What your app can put in a recap

• Fintech and banking: top spending categories, money saved, cashback earned, the busiest month.
• Food and grocery delivery: number of orders, favorite dish or store, the latest late-night order.
• E-commerce and fashion: items bought, favorite brand, money saved with promo codes.
• Telecom: data used, most-used app category, countries visited with roaming.
• Travel and mobility: trips, kilometers, cities visited, the earliest departure.
• Fitness and health: workouts, steps, streaks, personal records.

Pick 5–8 values you already store. A recap doesn’t need new analytics: it needs data you have, told as a story.

Ideas from real year-in-review campaigns

Recaps that people finish and share rarely stop at a list of numbers. Here is what retail, streaming and banking apps did in their 2025 campaigns.

• Turn every number into a reveal. A grocery chain hid each stat under a “scratch to find out” layer: points earned, hours saved with delivery, money saved with promotions. Users tap to uncover their own number.
• Add a quiz. “Guess what you bought most often” with five answers, then the real one, then a button to generate a personal “shopping DNA” card.
• Slice the year. Spending by season, the date of the biggest purchase (“Remember that day?”), the month with the most cashback.
• Pick one concept. A streaming service framed the recap as film credits: “every film ends with credits, and so does your year.” The first slide promised a personal poster at the end, which kept people tapping.
• Let people share any slide. The streaming recap had a share button on every slide and ended with a summary card: favorite genre, hours watched, titles, ratings.
• End with gifts. Partner offers, a free month of a subscription, a ticket to a New Year prize draw. A note that “all gifts are waiting at the end” gives people a reason to finish, and the gifts stay in a separate section afterward.
• Ask for feedback. One slide asks users to rate their year from 1 to 10.
• Promote the entry. A floating widget and a banner on the home screen lead to the recap, so nobody has to look for it.

Recaps don’t have to be yearly. A bank runs a monthly bonus report, and users with no activity yet see a friendly note instead of empty numbers: start using the card, and next month you’ll get a detailed report.

Three ways to build it

1. Build it in-house

Your team designs and develops a dedicated screen or flow. You get full control, but it takes design, development and QA time from the product team, an app release before the season, and code someone has to maintain or remove after December.

2. A web page or a one-off campaign

A personalized landing page or email. Faster to ship, but users leave the app to see it, and the engagement and sharing happen outside your product.

3. Personalized in-app stories with an SDK

The recap lives inside the app as stories. Developers integrate the SDK once and pass user values through placeholders. Marketers build the slides in an editor and can launch, edit or stop the campaign without a release. Next year, you reuse the same template. This is the option with the least long-term maintenance.

How to launch a year in review with InAppStory: step by step

1. Choose the metrics. Agree with product and analytics on 5–8 values per user, plus a fallback for users with little activity.
2. Create placeholders in the console. Text placeholders hold numbers and names (for example, %orders_total%), image placeholders hold a picture per user, such as their favorite product. How placeholders work.
3. Pass the values from the app. Developers send them through the SDK at initialization or at runtime — on Android, with setPlaceholder(key, value) and setImagePlaceholder(key, value). Android guide.
4. Design the slides. One fact per slide, big numbers, short captions, your brand colors. Work from a template, so the team only swaps texts and images.
5. Make the last slide shareable. Turn on the share button in the stories reader and design a final card that looks good in a social feed.
6. Add a next step. End with an offer, a promo code or a goal for next year, so the recap leads to an action, not just a view.
7. Target and test. Show the full recap to active users, give low-activity users a lighter version, and check it on several real accounts before launch.
8. Measure. Track views, completion to the last slide, shares and taps on the final call to action.

Timeline for a December launch

• Early to mid-November: choose the metrics, prepare the data, create placeholders.
• Second half of November: design the slides and test them on real accounts.
• First week of December: launch. Wrapped 2025 went live on December 3, and that’s the week people compare recaps.
• Rest of December: keep the recap in the app until the end of the year, then save it as next year’s template.

Tips that make a recap work

• Keep it short: 6–10 slides. People tap through stories fast.
• Keep the facts positive or neutral. A blunter, playful tone works only as an opt-in, like Monzo’s “savage” mode.
• Respect privacy. Use only data users expect you to have, and keep sensitive information off any card made for sharing.
• Plan for low-activity users: a general “our year together” story or a quiz instead of empty numbers.
• Add one interactive moment. A poll or a guess (“How many orders do you think you made?”) keeps people tapping. Poll answers can also become user-generated content for your social media.

No user data ready? Make it a game

If your data won’t be ready in time, run a seasonal game instead: a quiz about the year, a scratch card or an advent calendar with a reward every day. See our guide to a digital advent calendar campaign.

Short on time?

Contact us today, and you can still launch a year in review for your live audience this season. The first month on real users is free: you pay only if you like the results and decide to stay. Talk to our team.

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