Android alpha/beta thread

gravelld

A new thread to consolidate news of alpha and beta releases for the Astiga Android app.

We use the alpha track for testing releases that have cleared our own internal testing. This means they are broadly stable, but haven't been tested with the full range of different Android hardware, firmware, bundled software and OS variants.

We use the beta track for testing releases which have had exposure to more devices and are essentially expected to be production ready. The beta track gives us more statistically significant numbers by which we can judge the stability and reliability of a given release.

We have a tighter group of alpha testers, as opposed to the beta testing track which is "open" testing. If you'd like to be an alpha tester, drop a reply here. If your email address in Astiga is different to Google Play, you'll have to supply your Google play email address (you can do that by emailing us at info@asti.ga ). If you'd like to be a beta tester, you should be able to sign up via Google Play.

gravelld

1.5.31

We've noticed some crashes for users of Android 12+ when the app is in the background and battery optimisation or some other process causes the playback service to be destroyed. When the app is resumed, but still in the background, we attempted to start the service in the foreground again, which is no longer permitted and caused a crash. This build fixes one of these cases (hopefully!).

gravelld

1.5.31 has been promoted to the beta track.

gravelld

Into the alpha track...

1.5.32

Some more improvements around foreground/background operation on Android 12+ to reduce crashes:

• When brought to the foreground, start the playback service in the foreground but do so in a different thread, and check we're running in the foreground before doing so.
• Guard against the "remote control" API being unset, which might happen when coming to/from the background.

gravelld

1.5.32 is now in beta.