Request: Android app (looking for volunteers)

[adrienjoly]

EDIT (11 July 2020):

Openwhyd users are still hoping for a mobile app! 🌠 (see this discussion on our community)

🇬🇧 If you are a developer who wants to make hundreds of users happy while playing with React-Native (or other)? Please say "Hi" as a comment, below! Beginners are welcome 🤗 and will be guided through the process.

🇫🇷 Tu es développeuse/développeur et aimerais rendre des centaines d'utilisatrices/utilisateurs heureux, tout en jouant avec React-Native (ou autre) ? Laisse un petit mot ci dessous ! Débutant•e•s bienvenu•e•s 🤗, vous serez aidé•e•s.

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EDIT (15 March 2019):

"An Android app" is what has been most requested by Openwhyd users, for years! 🔥

Indeed, while Openwhyd has an iPhone app, openwhyd.org is not adapted to smarphone screens and is not capable of playing music from the browser...

Here is a non exhaustive list of features that could be implemented in an Android app:

• login to your openwhyd.org account, to find your tracks and playlists
• be able to play your tracks and playlists, like on the website
• be able to look for another openwhyd user or playlist, and play its tracks
• add a track from YouTube and SoundCloud, directly from their app
• allow playlists to keep playing in the background, even if the screen is off

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EDIT (22 Apr 2018):

Many Openwhyd users would be very happy to have an Android app that would allow them to 1/ login to their openwhyd account, 2/ play their tracks, and 3/ add tracks to their playlists. So, on the behalf of our community of music lovers, thank you for considering to integrate (or develop) your Android app with Openwhyd's back-end! 🙌

Here are a few recommendations on how to get started:

1. If you're creating your music app from scratch, I advise you to start by trying to play Youtube videos from your app first.
2. My second recommendation is to not try to implement every Openwhyd feature at once => developer it little by little, and start with prototyping most valuable/critical features first.
3. Example of good first feature to implement: play a list of Youtube videos sequentially from any Openwhyd playlist using its JSON API (public data --> no login needed), e.g. https://openwhyd.org/adrien/playlist/61?format=json
4. When your app is able to play Youtube tracks from an Openwhyd playlist, you can either add support to other streaming sources (e.g. YouTube, SoundCloud, vimeo, Bandcamp, mp3 streams), or build a UI for users to provide their Openwhyd user id + pick the playlist they would like to play. => Having an Android that just does that would already provide a lot of value to most of our users!
5. You want to make sure that your app will keep playing the music even when the user turns off the screen, or switched to another app. You may need to implement some clever tricks, and find some inspiration from our iOS app's codebase. (e.g. openwhyd-ios/WDYoutubeDecoder.m)
6. After that, you may want to allow users to add new tracks to their Openwhyd playlists. In order to do that, you will have to use the /login endpoint of our API (documented there) and to pass the resulting HTTP cookie to all future API calls that required a logged-in user.

You can find help and documentation in several places:

• in this folder: openwhyd/docs (API reference and other documentation)
• in Openwhyd's iOS codebase and web codebase (contains the back-end + front-end)
• in the first alternative web client developed by one of our users: sound-nuggets ("a react front-end for Openwhyd") and ask questions to his author
• and by asking questions to our Facebook group: Openwhyd Music Lovers Club.

I'll do my best to assist you during its development, especially for the use of our API, so don't hesitate to send your questions!

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EDIT (10 Nov 2017): Proposed implementation: Android application with react native

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[adrienjoly]

News: following the publishing of my article "Don’t build a back-end for your Android music app 🎧", two Android app developers are considering to integrate Openwhyd's back-end!

• Ravi Shanker Manchi (discussing by email)
• and Akash Bisariya: https://medium.com/@bigakash/hi-adrien-a0786937403f

[akshaysolanki941]

Hi, I would like to volunteer for this.

[adrienjoly]

Thanks for reaching out, Akshay! I just replied to your email, can't wait to chat with you!

[adrienjoly]

ping @bhugot

[adrienjoly]

Reminder: until we setup something like OAuth, it's still possible to fetch playlists from any domain, using our public JSON API.

[adrienjoly]

The Openwhyd Music Lover community has spoken:

The most wanted use cases on Android are:

1. Play tracks that I posted (my profile and playlists), or my stream, or hot tracks
2. a web app that works properly and doesn't stop playing

[adrienjoly]

Update: In order to call for developers, I just posted this announcement on openwhyd.org:

[amorenojimenez]

I'm beginning this small application based in ionic in case someone can give me a hand :)

https://github.com/amorenojimenez/openwhyd-mobile

[adrienjoly]

Here's another framework that could potentially be used to create a native mobile app in JavaScript: https://nativescript.org/

[adrienjoly]

Finding: Stretto (https://next.kaiserapps.com/) – an alternative to Openwhyd that can also play Youtube and SoundCloud tracks – has an open-source mobile app for Android: https://github.com/benkaiser/stretto-mobile-next/.

=> Suggested next steps:

1. test this app to make sure it can still play youtube and soundcloud tracks
2. fork it to load tracks from an openwhyd profile

EDIT, important note: the playback of tracks seems to go through a "streamer" server that convert tracks to mp3.

[adrienjoly]

Other idea: build a bridge between openwhyd's backend and existing mobile apps that support open protocols

e.g. https://funkwhale.audio/fr_FR/apps (docs: https://docs.funkwhale.audio/ + https://docs.funkwhale.audio/users/apps.html#enabling-subsonic-on-your-funkwhale-account)

[adrienjoly]

FYI, Alex has implemented an Android app for Openwhyd: https://github.com/alexllanas/open-audio