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Candela wiki

Current version: v1.4.6 Candela is TechEmpower's accessible resource app. Browse free tech guides, connect with our peer-support Discord, dial 211 for local help — and listen to any of it through a neural-voice audiobook engine that reads everything aloud.

Under the hood: twenty-seven fiction backends (Royal Road, GitHub, RSS / Atom feeds, local EPUB folders, local PDF files, on-device OCR, self-hosted Outline wikis, Memory Palace, Project Gutenberg, LibriVox, Archive of Our Own, Standard Ebooks, Wikipedia, Wikisource, Radio with 30k+ stations, Notion, Hacker News, arXiv, PLOS, Discord, Telegram, Palace Project, Slack, Matrix, Readability web articles); three in-process voice families (Piper, Kokoro, KittenTTS) with optional Azure HD cloud voices; AI chat per fiction across seven LLM providers with cross-fiction memory, function calling, and multi-modal image input; built for Android phones, tablets, and Wear OS.

📦 Latest release: v1.4.6 — Play Store readiness — Warm-up progress bar fix, deprecated API cleanup, and listing copy finalized for first Play Store submission.

📖 Source: github.com/techempower-org/candela · License: GPL-3.0 · Site: candela.techempower.org

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What's new in v1.4.6

Play Store readiness. Warm-up progress bar fix, deprecated API cleanup, and listing copy finalized for first Play Store submission.

  • Warm-up progress bar in the reader now only appears during the warming state, and uses the non-deprecated LinearProgressIndicator lambda overload. (#1319 / #1353 / #1358)
  • Sign-out ≠ deletion: corrected false claim in 5 docs that sign-out deletes cloud data — it only revokes the token. Cloud deletion requires the "Delete cloud data" action. (#1361)
  • Play Store listing copy finalized: title, descriptions, and release notes all under character limits, rebranded from storyvox to Candela, live and canonical copies in sync. (#1359 / #1362 / #1364)
  • Backend source test sweep: 12/15 sources verified on Z Flip3, all 3 playback pipelines proven. (#1361)

Recent v0.5 highlights

  • Cold launch 6.7 s → 0.8 s on Galaxy Tab A7 Lite (v0.5.46 — R8 + Baseline Profile + isDebuggable=false).
  • Full PCM cache series — streaming-tee, cache-hit playback, background pre-render, Settings UI, status icons (v0.5.47–v0.5.49).
  • Twelve a11y findings closed (v0.5.43) — high-contrast brass-on-near-black theme, reduced-motion fold-in, TalkBack pacing.
  • Nav settled — four-tab dock {Playing · Library · Voices · Settings} (v0.5.50 final, after v0.5.40 restructure).
  • Cross-device InstantDB sync (v0.5.39+) — library, follows, positions, bookmarks, pronunciation, encrypted secrets.
  • KittenTTS lightest-tier voice family (v0.5.36 — #119).

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