Lineup Explorer is built for the festival, not for the wifi

April 13, 2026 · Coachella Weekend 2 launch

Coachella Weekend 1 just wrapped. If you were there, you know the drill: 50,000 people on the same handful of cell towers, AT&T and T-Mobile both crawling, the official festival app spinning forever before it loads anything, and three different friends asking you “wait, when is Sabrina Carpenter?” while you're standing in the sun with 8% battery and no reception.

That's the problem Lineup Explorer was built to solve.

We're rolling out the Weekend 2 schedule the moment Goldenvoice publishes it — set times, stages, additions, late changes, all of it — so when you walk through the gate on Friday April 17, the app on your phone already knows everything you need to know.

This article walks through what Lineup Explorer is, how to set it up before you leave home, and how to use it while you're at the festival.

What is Lineup Explorer?

Lineup Explorer is a free, open-source web app for browsing festival lineups interactively. It currently covers:

• Coachella 2026 (April 11-13 & 18-20)
• Stagecoach 2026 (April 24-26)
• Head Trip 2026 (October 10-11)

You open the festival poster in your browser, tap any artist name, and you instantly see their genre, set time, stage, social links, and a YouTube preview of their music. You save the artists you want to see with a bookmark icon. The app builds a personalized day-by-day schedule from your saves, lets you export individual sets to your calendar, and gives you a shareable link so your friends can copy your schedule with one tap.

There's no account to create. No app to download from the App Store. No tracking. No ads. You open a URL and you're done.

Why it exists

The official Coachella app is fine on a fast wifi network. It's not fine inside the festival. Polo Field reception is notoriously brutal — five carriers, one tower, fifty thousand phones, and every person on Instagram. The app times out. The lineup grid won't load. The “favorites” you saved last week are stuck behind a login screen that's also waiting on the network.

Lineup Explorer is designed around one assumption: once you're at the festival, you might not have a working internet connection again until you're back at the car. Every feature has been built to work that way.

The app installs to your home screen as a Progressive Web App (PWA), caches everything it needs on first load, and runs entirely on your phone after that. Saving an artist writes to your phone's local storage instantly, with no server round-trip. Your schedule lives on your phone, not in the cloud. Sharing your schedule with a friend uses a URL — no app-to-app handoff, no DM, no waiting on a server.

The best festival app is the one that still works when nothing else does. That's the design goal.

Set it up before you leave home

Five minutes on real wifi the night before you head out and you're set. Here's how to do it on each device.

iPhone (Safari)

1. Open lineupexplorer.app in Safari (it has to be Safari, not Chrome — only Safari can install web apps to the home screen on iOS)
2. Tap the Coachella 2026 card
3. Browse the lineup, tap a few artists, save the ones you want to see
4. Tap the Share button at the bottom of the Safari toolbar (the square with an arrow pointing up)
5. Scroll down in the share sheet and tap Add to Home Screen
6. Tap Add in the top right

You'll now have a Lineup Explorer icon on your home screen that opens like a real app — no Safari address bar, no tabs, full screen. The first time you open it, it'll cache the festival data so you can use it offline.

If you don't see “Add to Home Screen” in the share sheet, scroll all the way to the bottom and tap Edit Actions, then enable Add to Home Screen. iOS hides it behind a settings menu in some configurations.

Android (Chrome)

1. Open lineupexplorer.app in Chrome
2. Tap the Coachella 2026 card
3. Chrome will pop up an “Install app” prompt at the bottom of the screen — tap it
4. If the prompt doesn't appear, tap the three-dot menu in the top right and pick Install app or Add to Home screen

The app will install to your home screen and open full-screen like a native Android app. It works offline after the first load.

Desktop / laptop

You don't really need to install anything on desktop — it's a website, you just open it. But if you want a dedicated icon in your Dock or taskbar:

• Chrome / Edge: Click the install icon in the address bar (looks like a small monitor with a down arrow), or open the three-dot menu → Save and share → Install Lineup Explorer.
• Safari (macOS): File menu → Add to Dock.

Desktop is great for the night before you leave — bigger screen, easier to plan, easier to share the link with your group chat.

How to actually use it at Coachella

Here's the real workflow once you're on Polo Field with one bar of LTE.

Open the app from your home screen, not Safari

This matters more than you'd think. When you open it from the home screen icon, iOS and Android serve the cached version of the app shell instantly, and the service worker handles everything that doesn't need a fresh network request. When you open it through Safari/Chrome, the browser tries to refresh the page and you wait. Always use the home screen icon at the festival.

Tap My Schedule to see your day

The “My Schedule” button at the top of the festival page opens a panel with your saved artists organized by day, sorted by start time. Friday on top, Saturday next, Sunday last. Each entry shows the artist, the set time, and the stage. Tap Add to Cal on any artist to add just that set to your iPhone or Google Calendar — useful for setting alerts so you don't lose track of time during a stage transition.

Decide what to do at any given moment

The Full Artist Lineup section underneath the poster is your “what's happening right now and what's next” view. Use the time filter to multi-select the next two or three hours. The artist cards filter down to just what's actually playing in that window across every stage. Tap a card to see the full details. Tap the bookmark icon to add it to your schedule on the fly.

This is the killer move at the festival. You're standing between Outdoor and Mojave, you don't know who's playing where, and the schedule grid in the official app hasn't loaded in two minutes. In Lineup Explorer you tap the time filter, pick “5 PM” and “6 PM”, and the cards rearrange to show you exactly what's happening, sorted by stage, in under a second — entirely from data already on your phone.

Share your schedule with your group

This is the feature your friends will actually use. From the My Schedule panel, tap the Share button (top right). You get two things:

1. A copyable text printout of your schedule — formatted with day headers, set times, stages, and artist names. Paste it into a group chat, screenshot it, whatever. Works without any app on the recipient's end.
2. A shareable permalink — a URL that encodes your saved artists. Send it to a friend; when they open it, the app shows them your schedule with a banner that says “Viewing shared schedule” and a one-tap Copy to My Schedule button. They get your picks copied directly into their own My Schedule, which they can then edit, add to, or share onward.

The permalink works without either of you having an account. It works without your friend installing anything. It even works if your friend has never opened Lineup Explorer before — the URL takes them straight to the right festival page with your schedule preloaded.

Save battery while you're there

A few things help your phone last:

• The app is a PWA, not a native app, so it's not running in the background draining battery
• It doesn't poll the network. Once your data is loaded, it doesn't ping any server unless you do something
• It doesn't track you, doesn't load ads, doesn't autoplay anything
• Lower your screen brightness — the app's dark theme is built so it's still readable at low brightness

If you're really worried, turn off cellular data once you've loaded the page once. The app will continue to work for the rest of the day on cached data alone.

Designed to be the most useful festival app of its kind

There are a lot of festival apps. Most of them are made by ad agencies for the festival's marketing team, optimized to push you toward sponsored content and merch sales. They assume you have wifi. They assume you'll create an account. They assume you'll let them notify you. They put the lineup three taps deep behind a splash screen.

Lineup Explorer is the opposite of that:

The whole thing is open source on GitHub. The Big-O analysis of the artist filter is in docs/COMPLEXITY.md. The story of how we cut the page payload by 99.6% is in docs/PERFORMANCE.md. The architectural choices are explained in the decision records. It's not a proprietary black box — if you don't trust an app, you can read the code that runs on your phone.

What's new for Weekend 2

Weekend 1 just ended and we're already pushing the Weekend 2 schedule live as soon as Goldenvoice releases the official set times. The Weekend 2 lineup is identical to Weekend 1 with a small handful of late additions and substitutions, but the per-artist set times shift around. Some artists swap stages. A few go later or earlier.

A few things to know:

• Your saved artists carry over. If you saved Sabrina Carpenter for Weekend 1, she's still in your My Schedule for Weekend 2 — just with the new set time once the schedule updates.
• Late additions are flagged. Any artist added after the original lineup announcement gets a small “ADDED” badge so you can spot what's new at a glance.
• The shareable permalink updates automatically. If you sent a friend a permalink during Weekend 1, the same URL will load with the Weekend 2 set times once the schedule goes live.
• The “Viewing Shared Schedule” banner lets the recipient see exactly what you saved — perfect for a group chat where one person does the planning and everyone else copies their picks.

If you missed Weekend 1, the lineup is essentially the same headliners and a few different undercards. Use Lineup Explorer to plan your Weekend 2 the same way you would have planned Weekend 1: open the poster the night before, save the artists you can't miss, build your schedule, share it with whoever you're going with, install it to your home screen, and then forget about the network for three days.

Try it now

lineupexplorer.app

If you find a bug, or an artist with the wrong set time, or you have a feature request, the repo is at github.com/magicology/lineup-explorer. Open an issue.

See you in Indio.