As most of you probably didn’t know, there is a MusicBrainz Android app that was developed during GSoC 2010.
Unfortunately the creator and maintainer Jamie McDonald, who worked on the app for nearly five years, was swallowed by professional work and couldn’t continue maintaining it.
At this point we’ve got an app that may or may not run on current Android versions and none of the active developers (both MetaBrainz employees and community) have the knowledge or time to work on it. This is where you come in:
If you would like to help with the MusicBrainz Android app, please answer in this thread! You don’t necessarily need previous Android development experience but just having someone willing to work on the app would be a lot better than the current situation.
The MusicBrainz Android app is also good candidate for a future Google Summer of Code project so if you’re interested in that, feel free to also leave a response.
It does work on Lineage OS 15.1 (Android 7).
It’s one of the only two apps I have on my phone that I didn’t download from F-Droid.
I haven’t used it a lot yet, but apart from a few inconveniences I haven’t found any actual bugs.
I can’t help with any developing, but I’m happy to help with testing or translating.
Actually getting it this into F-Droid would be a great goal for any new maintainer. As far as I remember it uses the Google Play Services or something which probably needs to be replaced.
It would be a shame if this app does not get some maintenance. I actually used parts of its code that handles the MB web service request in my Picard Barcode Scanner app, which is in bad need of some update as well
I am a React Native developer and have worked on many apps integrated material UI into a few apps and am willing to help out with the development of MusicBrainz app. I’d recommend re-creating it using React Native so the maintenance is easier as the code will be same for both Android or iOS.
Hi. I was thinking on building a shared app for Android and iOS in Flutter (which compiles to native code). But my main concern is the MB API: I’m more into an artist’s recordings than simply listing albums (because I’m interested in listening to every performance available), and to retrieve the whole amount of useful information I have to make many queries.
I had thought of play a little bit with GraphQL to make a proof-of-concept about a customizable API which would allow to retrieve the essential data at once (necessary for mobile apps to save bandwidth and battery)
What do you think? Is anybody interested in talking more deeply about this? I’m open to suggestions!
Flutter is a great option if we want a common codebase. I haven’t worked much with flutter but it is limited to UI, I suppose. I guess we need to use native os sdks also. But as you have said, one of the main issues will indeed be work on MusicBrainz API. I think I need to familiarize myself with it before I can comment further.
Sure! Give the API a read and let me know your opinion about its optimization for mobile devices.
Regarding Flutter I can comment that it also supports writing native code in case it lacks anything we may need (although I cannot think of many cases where the MB app would need specific native OS API access)
I am thinking of picking this up but with flutter. Flutter has come a long way and its current stable release is 1.21hotfix5. Besides flutter is not limited to UI alone. @amCap1712 I would like if you could get in touch. I read your gsoc proposal and also saw your implementation on github.
I don’t think it will be possible to carry on this project as a GSoC project this year. There is a lot of work to be done but it is currently stalled due to pending discussions. Also, Flutter was left out at that time due to technical issues with accessing audio files and reading their metadata. I am not sure those have yet been resolved.
I was considering replacing the app code with React Native alternate and also making use of the code written by amcap1712 during GSoC 2019, It’s a project that requires more research as of now. Based on what the community says, I can proceed with further research
As per the latest discussions, the app will be available for working on as a GSoC project. But there is no plan as of now to rewrite it in other languages.
Hello @amCap1712. I am an Android Application Developer and would love to work on this application as a GSoC student. I went through the work done by you during last year’s GSoC and would really like to continue with it and improve the application. This was the repository on which you did your work last year. Will the work be done on the same repository this year? If so, can I start with creating some issues and working on them by sending pull requests?
