v3.15 - Android TV / Google TV version

Sonance 3.15

Samsung TV: install one package: Sonance3.wgt (square icon) or Sonance3-Oblong.wgt (wide home-row tile). Android TV and Google TV: install Sonance3-AndroidTV.apk. Settings → About reads V3.15.

3.15 brings Sonance to Android TV and Google TV. On the Samsung TV nothing changes but the version number.

New

• Sonance for Android TV and Google TV. The same app, screens, settings and remote behaviour as on the Samsung TV, on any Android TV or Google TV device from Android 8.0: a TV, a streaming box such as the NVIDIA SHIELD, or a Chromecast with Google TV. It is sideloaded with adb, the Downloader app or Send Files to TV; docs/DEPLOYMENT-ANDROID-TV.md has the steps. Settings → About reads "Platform: Android TV" and the Android version, and Jellyfin lists the device as "Android TV".
• Music keeps playing in the background. Press Home or open another app, and Sonance plays on through the queue. When another app plays sound (a video, say), Sonance pauses, and shows paused when you come back; a short interruption, such as a notification sound, lowers the volume or pauses only for as long as it lasts.
• The remote works as on the Samsung TV: arrows, OK, Back and, where the remote has them, Play/Pause, Stop, Rewind, Fast-forward and the colour keys. Hold OK on a song for the options menu.
• The TV keyboard opens only when you press OK on a field, as on the Samsung TV, and music keeps playing while you type. Remote keys never go to a hidden keyboard (on the SHIELD, one could keep repeating a key after a sign-out and sign-in).
• Hi-res files sound right everywhere: 24-bit FLAC and WAV, up to 192 kHz, play at 16-bit resolution through Sonance's own player (Android 11's built-in player turned 24-bit FLAC into static on the SHIELD).
• The sleep timer works in the background: it stops playback on time while you are in another app.

Known differences on Android

• The text is in the system font (Roboto), because Samsung's SamsungOne font is not available. The layout is the same.
• The album's Yellow and Blue actions need a remote with colour keys; the SHIELD and Google TV remotes have none.
• There is no now-playing card on the Google TV home screen, and the media keys work while Sonance is in front, as on the Samsung TV. On Android 13 and later the playback notification is not shown.
• ALAC (Apple Lossless) plays only on devices that add their own decoder. Ogg Vorbis tracks may show an estimated length.
• 24-bit files play at 16-bit resolution: Android gives an app's player no deeper samples. The TV's output mixes to its own rate anyway (48 kHz on the SHIELD).
• Where the TV keyboard takes the audio (the SHIELD's does), music plays on more quietly while it is open.

For developers

• android/: a Java host on Android framework APIs only (no androidx, Media3, Leanback, Kotlin or Gradle). MainActivity hosts the .wgt's web payload, byte for byte, in the system WebView at a 1920×1080 CSS viewport and translates the remote's keys into Tizen's key codes; SonanceWebView keeps the D-pad and OK away from the system keyboard unless Sonance opened it, and opens it only on OK; PlayerEngine decodes with MediaExtractor and MediaCodec on a thread per stream and plays through an AudioTrack opened in the PCM encoding the decoder delivers, and holds the audio focus; PlaybackService is the mediaPlayback foreground service. targetSdk is pinned at 35, minSdk 26.
• The shim, android/shim/webapis.js, served at $WEBAPIS/webapis/webapis.js, provides webapis.avplay, webapis.appcommon and the tizen.* calls over the host's bridge, so the app runs its Tizen (AVPlay) code path unchanged, and keeps inputmode="none" on editables until the host opens the keyboard. Without the bridge it does nothing.
• Shared code: one seam, SonancePlatform, names the platform in Settings → About and in Jellyfin's Device= header. SleepTimer (js/screens/nowplaying.js) also checks its deadline on Player's progress events, because a hidden WebView page's timers stop; on the Samsung TV it behaves as before. The Tizen package is otherwise unchanged. JellyfinAPI's Version= is 3.15.0.
• Build: ./build-android.sh --debug | --release calls the SDK's aapt2, javac, d8, zipalign and apksigner directly. It fails if the APK's web payload differs from Sonance3.wgt, if the dex holds a class outside dev.simmo.sonance, or if the launcher entries or SDK levels are wrong. A release build is signed with your own keystore, from four SONANCE_* variables.
• Tests: e2e/android-shim.spec.ts (37 tests) drives the shim with a fake bridge, and e2e/sleep-timer-progress.spec.ts the sleep timer's progress check; the suite has 425 tests. Device checks run on the Android SDK's Google TV emulator: tests/tools/android-{keys,playback,background,engine,parity,devtools,seed-live}.js.
• Report: docs/v3-15-report.md, with the checklist for the first run on a real device.