Serato DJ For iOS Review

Video Review

First Impressions / Setting up

Serato DJ is now on the iPhone and iPad (no Android, at least not yet), and the first thing that strikes you is how faithful it is. The decks, the waveforms and the pads all look like Serato DJ Pro, so if you use Serato on a laptop, the muscle memory carries straight over.

It’s free to download from the App Store, and it needs iOS or iPadOS 18.6 or later. You can mix with your fingers on the screen straight away, using a set of demo tracks, or log into a streaming service and play from that.

Free or paid?

The free version is roughly what Serato DJ Lite is on a laptop. You get four hot cues, four sample slots, basic effects, basic stems and sync, and it works with a selection of entry-level controllers. Press anything you haven’t paid for and it flashes “upgrade” at you, which is of course the point, and of course rather annoying.

To unlock everything, you can buy it outright for $149, or get it at no extra cost if you already own or subscribe to Serato DJ Suite ($14.99 a month). The full version adds recording, DVS, the advanced pad modes, key shifting, Stems FX, the rest of the effects and the extra waveform views. As far as I can tell, hardware that unlocks Serato DJ Pro on a laptop doesn’t unlock the full app, so you’ll still need Suite or the $149 purchase.

Getting your music on

You’ve got three ways in: streaming (Apple Music, Beatport, SoundCloud, Spotify and Tidal are all supported), the Files app on your device, and a new transfer feature built into Serato DJ 5.0 on your laptop.

The transfer is the clever bit. Open the transfer panel in the app, your phone pops up in the sidebar of Serato on your laptop, and you drag a crate onto it. It works over Wi-Fi, or you can plug in a cable, which is much quicker, and your cues, loops and beatgrids come across with the music. It’s fast, it’s simple and it works.

In Use

On its own, with no hardware, the app is a perfectly capable way to mix. The layout is tidy, the controls are where you’d expect them to be, and modern iPhones have no trouble with the heavy lifting. Stems run in real time on the phone, and the new Cue Loops and Lucid Beatgrids from Serato DJ 5.0 are both here. OBviously though this is only for super casual use.

Plug in hardware and it makes more sense. Over 120 controllers and mixers are supported on day one, and when I plugged in a DDJ-FLX4 it was recognised straight away, with even the features unique to that controller, like Smart Fader, working as they should. I was pleasantly surprised that when I plugged in a Rane System One, its screen worked too. There’s full DVS for turntable DJs. Taken together, this is a serious piece of DJ software.

And there’s no reason it shouldn’t be. Algoriddim have shown for years with djay Pro that phones and tablets can do everything a laptop does, and sometimes more, so a modern, powerful Serato on iOS is welcome. It puts Serato on the same playing field as djay and Rekordbox at last.

The FLX4 and your phone

The most interesting set-up we tried was an iPhone plugged into a DDJ-FLX4. The FLX4 has a second USB-C socket that charges your phone while you DJ, so you plug in your phone, plug in the power, plug in normal speakers and headphones, and you’re away. There are no fiddly adapters and there’s no laptop at any stage.

The FLX4 works with the free version, although some of its features are locked unless you pay. If you’re happy playing from a streaming service, it makes a simple, fun and capable DJ system and I felt genuinely excited by this little setup.

The library problem

This is where the app falls down, and it’s the same thing that has held back DJing on phones and tablets since the start. A DJ who takes it at all seriously gathers, organises, analyses and prepares their music on a laptop, because a laptop is simply the best tool for the job. Unless that same library is available on the phone with no friction, I suspect most DJs won’t bother.

Serato’s transfer gets your music across nicely, but as far as I can tell it only goes one way. Any new cue point, tweaked beatgrid or new crate you make on your phone stays on your phone, with no way I can see to send it back to your laptop. There’s no cloud sync at all, so you have to decide in advance what you want on there and send it over, and every transfer creates a new dated folder on your phone.

The library inside the app is surprisingly basic too. There’s no genre column, so you can’t see or sort by genre. There’s no rating column, which is strange when ratings were one of the big new features in Serato DJ 4. There are no Smart Crates, and if you send one over from your laptop, it won’t come.

You can add tracks from a USB drive, but as far as I can tell your crates don’t come with them, and it doesn’t appear to read the music library already on your iPhone either. And while you can log into any of the five streaming services, you can only have one showing at a time, even though Serato DJ 5.0 on a laptop now lets you use several at once.

Phone DJing in general

Most people DJing on a mobile device are using a phone rather than a tablet, because once you’ve got an iPad, a stand and a hub to plug everything into, you may as well bring your laptop. And DJing from a phone plugged into DJ gear isn’t as practical as using a laptop. The screen is tiny, and most controllers don’t have a second USB-C socket, so you have to work out how to keep the phone charged.

Getting sound out to speakers and headphones can mean extra adapters and splitters with other gear. Serato themselves warn that calls and notifications can interrupt your set (they suggest flight mode with Wi-Fi turned on). And while you’re DJing, you no longer have your phone.

Pro use

CDJs won’t work with it in HID mode, so if you want to play on club decks, you’ll need to use DVS. Only Serato-approved hardware works at all, and for those who like to tweak, there’s no custom Midi mapping, which, along with Serato Video, Flip and Ableton Link, stays on the laptop.

Is it worth $149?

The free version is good enough to have some fun with. But $149 for the full version on its own is a lot, especially compared with djay Pro’s subscription. I can see Suite owners using the full version, because they’re getting it for nothing. I don’t think many people are going to pay $149 for it outright.

Conclusion

It’s great that Serato finally has a mobile app, and they’ve done a good job of it. It’s fast, it’s faithful to the laptop version, hardware support is excellent from day one, and the laptop-to-phone transfer is the neatest of any DJ app. But it’s held back by the limits of using a phone, by a library that’s strangely limited, and by the same thing that holds back every mobile DJ app: there’s still no easy, reliable, cloud-first DJ library that just works across all your devices.

So who’s it for? Anyone who wants to download it, log into Spotify or Beatport and DJ for fun on their phone will love it, and it costs nothing. Owners of a DDJ-FLX4 or similar entry level Serato unlock device can build a simple, laptop-free system around it. And if you already own or subscribe to Serato DJ Suite, the full app is free, so put a couple of crates on your phone and you’ve got a backup in your pocket. It isn’t for anyone who wants to build and manage a music collection properly, prepare on the go and pick that work up anywhere, or replace their laptop entirely. Not yet, anyway.

The alternatives

Rekordbox gets closest to solving the library problem, with a proper cloud library for your own music and apps for preparing and DJing on both laptop and phone. Unfortunately, it’s also the most frustrating of the three to use for this, and its Cloud Library Sync costs. djay Pro is usable across laptop and mobile: it syncs your cue points between devices over iCloud, but your playlists still need moving separately (for instance, via OneLibrary drives), which means extra steps.

Of the three, Serato’s transfer is the best, but it still doesn’t solve the problem. Ultimately it is a slick, faithful and capable Serato for your phone that, until DJ libraries truly live in the cloud, is a fun extra rather than a reason to leave your laptop at home.