Today we’re launching signage-apps.com: 30 apps, free for anyone to use on any screen.¹

It’s a starting point, not a finished product, so expect it to keep growing.

Where this came from

For years, we’ve had a couple of small apps running on their own subdomains: a clock and a weather app, built mostly with Anthias users in mind, for anyone who wanted something simple to fill an idle screen. We didn’t market them, didn’t track them closely, and figured they got a modest trickle of traffic.

Then we actually looked at the numbers. Over a recent 24-hour window, the clock app served 1.22 million requests and close to 745k visits. The weather app did even more: 1.68 million requests and over 370k visits. Traffic was coming from dozens of countries, led by the US and France, with Germany, Canada, and a long tail of others right behind. That’s a lot more than “a few Anthias boxes with a clock on them.”

It told us two things. First, that there’s real, sustained demand for free, no-nonsense signage content that doesn’t ask anything of the person using it. Second, that a good chunk of that demand has nothing to do with Anthias, or Screenly, at all. People were just finding these apps and putting them on whatever they had.

Why a separate project

We already have a clock and a weather app in the Screenly App Store. They’re good, and they’re part of what you get with Screenly. But that’s not what these two subdomain apps were. They weren’t tied to any product at all, and that’s exactly why they took off the way they did: no login, no account, nothing to buy into, just a link that works on whatever screen you point it at.

That’s worth protecting on its own terms, not folding into Screenly as a feature. So we built signage-apps.com through Screenly Labs instead, our outlet for community-facing work that isn’t tied to shipping Screenly as a product. Same team, different purpose.

Open source is part of why we work this way. Anthias, our free signage player, is the most popular digital signage software on GitHub by star count, and we contribute back as much as we can because it genuinely makes the industry better. signage-apps.com is another expression of that, not a one-off.

The Screenly App Store is part of the paid product: every app there is something we build, support, and stand behind as part of what you’re paying for.

signage-apps.com plays by different rules on purpose.

It’s free and unsupported in that formal sense, with no roadmaps and no SLAs, but that’s not a knock on quality.

We’re sharing something useful and seeing where the community takes it, whether you run Screenly, Anthias, or something else entirely.

Meet the library

Clocks, weather, air quality, quotes, a capital-cities quiz, word of the day, and auto-rotating headlines from NPR, BBC, Reuters, The New York Times, Hacker News, and more. 30 apps so far.

Every app works the same way: pick one, copy the link, and paste it into whatever you’re already running, whether that’s a browser or any CMS that supports web content.

What’s next

This is the first drop from Screenly Labs, not the last. We’ll keep adding apps and paying attention to what people ask for. If you build something on top of it, or want an app that doesn’t exist yet, tell us.

Head to signage-apps.com to browse the library and grab a link.