Coda is a focused, album-first Android client for Navidrome and compatible OpenSubsonic servers. It is built for people who want their server to remain the source of truth, without waiting for a mobile library database to synchronize.
Coda is an independent community project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Navidrome.
Project status: Coda is early alpha software. It already serves as a daily music player, but expect rough edges and changes while the first public versions are tested on more devices and servers.
Keeping a synchronized offline mirror of the server library is a useful design, but it can also mean new albums and server-generated playlists remain stale until another synchronization finishes. Coda is intended for listeners who prefer to query the server directly instead.
Coda deliberately takes the opposite approach:
- Navidrome is authoritative for artists, albums, playlists, ratings, search, and the saved queue.
- Opening a playlist fetches its current contents from the server.
- Pull-to-refresh requests fresh data without a background polling loop.
- Library metadata is not copied into a second local database.
- Phone artwork is cached persistently by the UI image loader so browsing still feels responsive.
The result is a small client centered on albums rather than podcasts, radio, generated mixes, recommendation feeds, or extensive configuration screens.
- Album-oriented home screen with recently added, top rated, recent releases, recently played, artists, playlists, and queue continuation.
- Chronological artist discographies and compact album track lists.
- Album, artist, and track search.
- Five-star album ratings written directly to the server.
- A real playback queue shared by the phone UI, media notification, and Android Auto.
- Server-authoritative playlists that retain their exact track order and are presented in album sections.
- Dynamic artwork-derived colors and a deliberately minimal interface.
- Android password-manager Autofill and encrypted credential storage using Android Keystore.
- Android Auto browsing, grouped search, playback controls, and phone-proxied artwork for private servers and VPNs such as Tailscale.
Coda is online-first, not an offline download manager.
- On Wi-Fi or Ethernet, Coda requests the original stream. This can be lossless FLAC, including high-resolution material, when that is what the server stores.
- On cellular, Coda requests Opus transcoding. No bitrate is hardcoded in the app; the server's transcoding configuration decides the delivered bitrate.
- Playback starts progressively rather than waiting for the complete track to download.
- A transient audio cache keeps the current track and next three tracks. Upcoming tracks are prefetched in the background, and old audio entries are discarded.
- Changing between Wi-Fi and cellular does not interrupt the current track. Upcoming uncached tracks are switched to the appropriate stream variant.
There is intentionally no permanent offline library. The transient audio cache is cleared when the playback service starts cold.
Artwork uses separate caches: the phone UI maintains its own image cache, while Android Auto uses a bounded car-artwork cache described below. These are not part of the four-track audio window.
Coda reads and writes Navidrome's saved play queue. Queue order, current track, and playback position can therefore be continued by another Navidrome client that supports the same server-side queue.
Queue changes are saved after relevant playback actions and periodically while listening. Scrobbles are retried after transient failures, and a track is submitted as played after 95% playback.
The Android Auto interface exposes four intentionally short sections:
- Artists, grouped into
#andA–Zbuckets to respect car-host list limits. - Recently added albums.
- Recently played albums.
- Playlists.
Search results are grouped into Artists, Albums, and Songs. Selecting an album or playlist creates the complete playback queue, shared with the phone.
Android Auto requires local artwork URIs. Coda downloads private server artwork through the phone's own connection, keeps a separate 128 MB car-artwork cache, and exposes it to the car through a local content provider. This also works when Navidrome is reachable only through a phone VPN such as Tailscale.
The first-run screen asks for a server URL, username, and password, verifies them with the server, and supports Android's Autofill framework. This allows compatible password managers such as Google Password Manager, Samsung Pass, Bitwarden, and 1Password to fill and save the login.
Credentials are encrypted with a non-exportable Android Keystore key. Coda has no analytics, advertising, or tracking SDK. Server credentials are not compiled into the APK.
HTTPS is strongly recommended whenever the server is reachable over an untrusted network. Plain HTTP remains available for explicitly trusted local-network installations, but Coda requires an explicit warning confirmation before connecting without transport encryption.
- Android 9 or newer (API 28+).
- A Navidrome server or a compatible OpenSubsonic implementation.
- Network access to that server from the phone.
The app currently supports one server and one account at a time. Disconnect from the Connection page to remove the stored credentials and use another account. Playback and artwork caches are isolated by account and the disconnected account's transient data is cleared in the background.
Prerequisites:
- JDK 17.
- Android SDK 36 with the corresponding build tools.
Clone the repository and build a debug APK:
./gradlew assembleDebugThe APK is written to app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk.
Run the verification suite with:
./gradlew testDebugUnitTest lintDebug assembleDebugRuntime server credentials are entered inside the app. local.properties is used only by standard
Android tooling when a local SDK path is required and must not contain Coda credentials.
Maintainer instructions for producing and verifying signed APKs are in docs/releasing.md.
- Podcasts and internet radio.
- Generated mixes and recommendation algorithms.
- Permanent offline downloads and offline-library management.
- Multiple simultaneous servers or user profiles.
- Landscape phone layouts; the phone UI is currently locked to portrait.
Coda was designed and implemented through an iterative, conversational workflow with OpenAI Codex. The product direction, design decisions, hands-on listening tests, car testing, and final judgment were human-led; a large portion of the implementation was AI-assisted. In other words: this project was vibe-coded, deliberately and transparently.
That origin is not a substitute for review. Bug reports, code review, testing on different servers and devices, and focused contributions are welcome.
Copyright 2026 iamtoolino.
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE. The bundled Manrope font is licensed separately under the SIL Open Font License; its license text is included with the app assets.