Antennapod: Release the next version please?

[eternaltyro]

App version: 1.6.5 (from F-Droid)

While it's a nice ideal to release a major version with a massive set of nice changes and upgrades, the delay in the release might chase people away from this otherwise awesome app. There are a few annoying bugs that I've been dying to get fixes for. It's been five months and I almost thought development had stalled. When I check here, I realize things are quite active. Please release a bug fix version at the least.

Thanks.

[ByteHamster]

We have released a beta version on Google Play. The final release (that also gets pushed to F-Droid) still needs some fixes because it contains massive changes to the background service. If someone wants to investigate the issues labeled as bugs, the release will be sooner ;)

[ghost]

@ByteHamster I think more people would test if we had a separate beta apk so we can beta test without the risk of messing up the progress of our podcast collections. Rolling out such an apk will be essential for testing henceforth.

And please consider making Exoplayer the default and only playback solution in the future.

And consider calling the next version 1.7 since it has such massive changes.

[ByteHamster]

@Riotous We have around 1800 testers on Google Play. What's missing is mostly people who fix the open issues ;) Releasing a separate beta apk is already implemented and will be merged as soon as possible.

As soon as ExoPlayer supports every feature that we currently support with Sonic, we will switch the default player. Currently, ExoPlayer does not support changing the volume independently for the left/right channel.

[ghost]

@ByteHamster With all due respect, I don't think many people use that left/right volume feature. I can't think of any podcast client that even does that. The only volume feature that most people would use is the automatic volume-leveling feature. I think Antennapod would be better served by having Sonic, which has been shown to be buggy in many issues on the issue tracker, be replaced by Exoplayer, which has more robust and less bug-prone playback, especially on VBR files. I think a lot of people are turned off to Antennapod by continuing to have Sonic as the default, and the sooner it is gone, the better.

Just my two cents.

[eternaltyro]

For me personally, I would like to avoid using Google play where possible. That's my case for a separate APK. Maybe we can use the release feature for distributing apks?