May 13th, 2011 → 2:00 pm @ Rekha at PRX
We know, we know. Android users want the Player, too.
Oh, the drama.
Here’s the deal. PRX wants to develop the Public Radio Player for Android. We know the Android OS dominates in smartphone sales. And I know we’ve been putting out teasers for a while – sorry about that. We made big progress last summer, thanks to the Google Summer of Code. But the app is pretty complex, and there’s a lot left to do. The original grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting did not fund Android – at the time of the grant, Android went from non-existent to fledgling. Meanwhile, PRX expanded our mobile app offerings to public media organizations, including This American Life and several stations. We’re a small team, and we’ve been busy with that.
But that’s not the only reason. Since last summer, we launched the This American Life Android app, with the same design and features as their iPhone app. That was a cautionary learning experience. For one thing, the adoption of the Android app has been less than 10% of the iPhone app. This, despite the reams of requests PRX and This American Life received from desperate Android users right up until launch. That may be an extreme situation, but — and I know all you Android users will not like to hear this — it’s true that app use by Android users is currently lower than Apple iOS users.
Yet it cost no less to develop.
There’s more. The beauty of Android’s openness is also a headache for developers (and it hasn’t changed much since this post last year). It’s many different versions of an OS across thousands of different devices. Despite our best efforts at testing, the This American Life app on Android is, shall we say, challenging for us and our users. As of now, media playback varies widely across devices, and it’s likely we’ll have to build our own solution. Netflix just announced they’re handling Android’s lack of a media playback standard by releasing on only five devices for now. Five, out of hundreds.
Plus, it’s not just about developing an app, it’s about caring for it once it’s in the wild, and caring for you, our *ahem* vocal audience. Audio playback sourced from thousands of station streams and podcasts compounds the issue. That’s true of the iPhone, but it’s even more true of the Android.
Oh wait, there’s even more. We are gearing up for a development sprint on the iPhone soon (watch this blog for an invite to give us ideas). We want to get at bugs and UI pain points, and make improvements for stations and users alike. When we do move forward on Android again, we want it to have the newest version of the iPhone app. So yes, more waiting.
I have an Android phone. A couple of my colleagues do, too. We would love to have the Public Radio Player (I use it on my iPod instead). But for a small, non-profit organization with tons of awesome stuff going on, it’s going to take more time.
Ok, commenters. Let us know what you think. As you can tell from our Give Feedback page, we approve all but the very rude, and we welcome niceness, too.
Rebecca
1 year ago
First, let me say that the public radio app is far and away my favorite app on the iphone. Kudos to the developers!! I love it and have told everyone I know about since I discovered it that is it the best thing the iphone has to offer.
I have recently switched to the Android and hope that it someday gets ported over. It was the only app I really was hoping I wouldn’t lose by switching to Android! I’ll keep my iphone and use the app when I have access to wireless until it gets ported. I am not sure, but my guess is that more people use the Public Radio app than the This American Life app (because, with the PR app, you can usually find TAL anyway).
Rachel Rawlings
1 year ago
Five months on….
Now that I’ve almost completely abandoned my iPod for my Android phone, the only things I need the former for are PRX and Scrabble.
So, has development of the PRX player for Android remained scrapped or mothballed? While I can’t account for the difference in downloads of This American Life (which I wouldn’t buy on either platform because it’s frankly far from being my favorite public radio program), I can say that there is a large open-source community which would be proud, grateful and helpful if PRX opened up the project to look for developers in the wider world.
Chris Rhoden
1 year ago
@Dan
I am a developer at PRX, and I can tell you from having worked with Android in several contexts that the issues that drove Netflix to support a limited number of devices are exactly the same issues everyone working with streaming media runs into.
Google Listen (which is a podcatching app) basically warns you that it will not work unless you are on Wifi or have downloaded the MP3. The media playback libraries provided by various manufacturers are the problems Netflix ran into – and it’s why they chose to support only devices using primarily vanilla Android – something that CyanogenMod is much closer to than the Samsung, Motorola, or HTC specific distributions.
Netflix also has direct control over all of the resources they stream, which is something the Public Radio Player has never had. We have to deal with streams in a variety of formats. Worse, streaming format compatibility varies based on operating system versions. If you are technically inclined, I encourage you to check out the source code for the NPR Android app (it is on Google Code), where they have literally had to set up a local webserver to proxy a stream and modify it on the fly so that the Android operating system can decode it. But they also have to decide to do this or not depending on what the phone supports.
To respond to your point about DRM, I suspect that Netflix is relying on obscurity and expiring URLs rather than using any DRM. The operating system does not support it, and the fact that they did not release on flavors of Android (such as the Samsung distributions) which support DRM natively speaks volumes. Frankly, there are harder problems to solve.
I woud love to have a conversation with you, but I tend to become very technical and I suspect this is not the appropriate venue. If you have a PRX account, please message me (I’m chrisrhoden) or you can find me on twitter with the same name.
Dan D
1 year ago
One more thing I noticed. You point to Netflix and their development issues. Well, that’s not quite the same thing. Netflix is working on DRM’ed video playback. Does public radio have DRM applied for some strange reason? Even if it doesn’t, it still isn’t something as processor intensive as video decompression and playback, so that issue shouldn’t exist. All this is still ignoring the fact that the Netflix app even works on devices that it wasn’t intended to, though, such as the Nook Color with CM7 installed.
Dan D
1 year ago
Really now… a lot left to do? Does that mean the claims that you were, and I quote, “just working on some audio performance issues” in December weren’t true? Even single person developers seem to be able to do that in a reasonably short time frame. It all sounds like a lot of double-talk to me.
If you want to know why something like “This American Life” didn’t do well as an app on Android, maybe you should look at consider that a lot of Android users want apps that can actually do more than one thing. They’re often more concerned with functionality than worrying about that spit-shine finish on apps or, let’s face it, they’d have iPhones. Something that is basically a pretty podcast app tuned for only one podcast is, well, just not that useful.
Could we please get some actual information on this? Do you plan to actually complete this project or is it just more vaporware?
Josh
1 year ago
Maybe you are right that there is not enough pent up demand for full Public Radio Player on Android to justify your resources. Your example of the This American Life app proves we’re likely a bunch of whiners who don’t represent a large slice of the real market place. Maybe NPR and CPB determined that the white upper middle class sweet spot of their demographic is still mostly buying iPhones and they rationally decided to use their limited volunteer, non-profit, (and a small %-wise but endangered amount of tax/government) resources to cater exclusively to Apple’s customers. Who am I to encourage them to spend limited resources elsewhere? I, for one, hope Apple succeeds in their quest to be the sole-provider of mobile internet, eBooks, etc. And when I changed from iphone to android and lost Public Radio Player, at first I was sad, but I came to realized that listening to Public Radio at all was a depressing waste of time, so they probably did me a favor.
Jason
1 year ago
It’s awesome that you are working on this, and I can’t wait. Consider releasing it for a few popular models, though, like the Droid 2, nudge nudge. That way at least some of us can start taking advantage of the work you have done so far. You can just release updates as new devices are perfected. I’m sure you thought of all this, of course, this is just my 2 cents.
The Android is everything the iPhone lacks.
Brian
2 years ago
The Iphone is way better than the Droid anyway, just switch over and spot your complaining.
Jonathan Marks
2 years ago
How hard can it be? Why don’t you look at what the UK has been doing with their players and cherry-pick from their technology. The whole industry there is working on web and mobile browsers. I believe the UK is well ahead of the US because they compete on content with their commercial colleagues but not when it comes to technology. Can’t say I have too much sympathy. http://www.radioplayer.co.uk/index.php/faq/