Astiga Roadmap - 2025
It's time to update the roadmap for Astiga development for 2025!
This is our chance to signal what broad areas we're going to be working on this year. As ever, we can't be too specific as to features or timescales, or over committal to any one thing for fear of changing priorities, but this is our way of at least communicating how we are steering the service.
Indeed, this past year has been a good lesson as to why we avoid being too committal. We've been hit by a number of unexpected requirements and have been finding a growing trend in integration with other cloud services is an increased burden on verification. For example, Google now require a month-long assessment process, yearly, which also costs us a significant amount of money (the assessments must now be performed by outside independent assessors). Hopefully this helps build credibility, but it's the kind of thing that can come unexpectantly and throw us off-course!
Last year's roadmap is here: https://community.asti.ga/discussion/662/astiga-roadmap-2024
How do we decide what to focus on? Well, basically it's a combination of ensuring the service can support itself, financially, and delivering those features that are requested by our current users.
This year, we're going to concentrate on broadly the same topics, looking to make up for ground we lost last year... Let's separate it to four main areas we're looking to improve: library browsing, playlist handling, our mobile apps and new integrations.
Library enhancement
A large part of the usability of a music player comes from the nature of the library. If you have a library that is not well organised it is difficult to use the service, no matter how slick the service itself is.
This doesn't apply to all of you of course... if anything, Astiga users tend to have tidier libraries than most. However, a large proportion of our users don't have sparkling libraries and it's a big turn off when "it doesn't look like Spotify".
In the background we've been working on combining Astiga's sync process with bliss to correct and complete library data. The first steps are currently in alpha testing with some of our users, and is currently limited to fixing album names, multi disc organisation (no more "All Things Must Pass Disc II" style names) and adding artist biographies and images.
We're hoping to open this up to more people for testing soon, and also start to expand the features; we've been getting requests for genre consolidation, track name fixing and more. This feature is disableable so you can go back to using your tags exclusively.
Playlists
Playlists are important to a lot of our users, and there're a number of areas we want to improve:
- Performance of large playlists on mobile apps.
- User-led fixing of playlists and orphaned/missing tracks.
Apps
This one has been blocked by access to skilled resource. If you know any good mobile developers who'd like to work on Astiga, let us know!
Broadly we want to (and these will be our focus in these areas):
- Improve the UX of the Android version
- Launch an iOS app
Integrations
We want to ensure Astiga is available for you to be used on all your devices. We're currently in the early stages of testing for integration into the Sonos platform and there are other ideas that have been put to me: Android TV, WiiM, Alexa, Home Assistant, Roku and more.
Outside of playback, we could also integrate at a storage level, providing more convenient methods for integrating self-stored NAS drives with Astiga.
So those are the main areas we're working on. Feel free to drop us a line, here or by email, if you have something to say about these!