Any plans for an iOS app?

CoffeeCoffee Member
in Astiga app

Hi,

I love the flexibility that Astiga provides with Subsonic, however there isn't really any great subsonic app for iPhone at the moment. Are there any future plans to create an Astiga app for iOS, similar to the Android one?

Comments

  • KoenKoen Member, Former

    At the moment there is no iOS app planned - however, that might change in the future. Creating an iOS app is quite an investment, both time- and moneywise*, and I think both AVSub and play:Sub do a pretty good job on iOS at the moment, hence I do not feel like there is an immediate necessity for an Astiga-specific app.

    I believe both of them have a comparable feature set to the Astiga Android app, at least for as far as I can see. So out of curiosity, what problems are you facing? Maybe that is something that can already be solved.

    * In order to create an iOS app, you need an iPhone and Mac, plus a $99/year Apple Developer Program membership; so in total you'd be looking at an investment of ~$2000 to even get started.

  • CoffeeCoffee Member

    Thanks for getting back, makes sense re: not developing for iOS due to the high costs.

    With AVSub I really struggle with the layout and navigation, it's not really simple and intuitive, and distances itself quite a bit from what you would expect from a music player on iOS. Just as an example, I struggled to get to a place where I could see a list of all albums in my collection.

    play:Sub is a little better. I managed to play some music, add to a queue, etc. However, it would crash on occasion, and is still a little cluttered (excess of features?).

    Thanks again for the quick reply, it makes sense. I think I may use Astiga online when away from my home computer, and then just transfer music over to my phone the old way when needed.

  • KoenKoen Member, Former

    Ah, yes, I understand. I thought you meant missing functionality.

    UX is indeed a problem, one that also exists in the Astiga app, mind you, although I am working on improving that. The main issue is that everyone uses and organises their music library in a different way, and most people have a particular way in which they want to access their library. The issue is catering to all those people whilst still keeping the app intuitive.

    Now, I think most people agree that the amount of features is excessive. However, everyone finds something else important. For example, something I have read a lot is "Why does this app not support X? It is a basic feature!". The funny thing is that what X is tends to be different for a lot of people. As a personal example: I could not understand why so little music apps supported folder browsing, as I had organised my library in a particular way so I could find everything again, and I rarely browse through albums and artists. Others have exactly the opposite. Some people find aiff support very important, whilst I'd personally struggle to find an aiff file in my library.

    My goal is to not prescribe what features you use, but to leave that up to you [1]. That also seems to be the (implicit) idea behind AVSub and play:Sub as well. The unfortunate side effect is what you described. Mind you, it is not unavoidable, but it is very difficult to avoid. An Astiga app for iOS would most likely fall for the same trap.

    I hope that I sketched the background behind the decisions a bit, and why this choice was ultimately made. An iOS app for Astiga would most likely be very similar to what is already offered, because the idea behind it shares a lot of resemblance, hence I do not believe that an Astiga-specific app at this point in time is worth it.

  • maxinegerbmaxinegerb Member

    Hi. Now that google play music is going away, and youtube music is its replacement, I'm looking for a new strategy for accessing my music in the cloud. One option would be to upload all of my songs to S3 or google drive and use a client like astiga for access. My phone is an iPhone, so I could use the astiga browser client, but it would be much better if there was an ios app. I'll try the browser for a while and see how that goes, but I'm guessing I'll end up choosing a product that does have an ios app. So I hope you decide to create an ios app.

  • KoenKoen Member, Former

    @maxinegerb Like I said, there are a couple of iOS apps that work with Astiga - you are not confined to the browser client. However, a dedicated iOS app is not planned at the moment.

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