Astiga Roadmap - 2026

gravelldgravelld Administrator
in General

I wanted to update the roadmap for 2026! Last year's roadmap is beginning to look messy and I wanted to refresh our priorities.

Each year I like to map out our current thinking of how we will be steering Astiga, product development wise, over the coming months. This is so we can voice our priorities right now and give you a chance to feedback with your own.

As before, this roadmap should really just be considered a general guide as to some broad areas we will be working on; not a specific dated commitment. We try to keep our descriptions on the general-side, avoiding specifics. That's because we know that feedback might steer us in a different way, and problems can sometimes become apparent that mean we can't implement something in a specific way.

Those are also the broad areas; there are also a lot of other things we want to improve in browsing, playing, managing, cataloguing and recording your library. Look out for some developments on these fronts too!

Inevitably, parallel to feature development we have a bunch of other things to do. These are:

  • Marketing
  • Service availability
  • Service scaling
  • Customer support
  • External audits and assessments

As a result it may seem like sometimes we aren't releasing a lot of features, but rest assured feature development is where our heart really lies!

How we decided the roadmap

Through the year we take opinions and input from numerous routes:

  • This forum
  • Responses to surveys of active users
  • Emails we receive
  • Developments in the market, and the opportunities presented by new technological developments
  • Analysis of feature use

Last year...

In terms of pure functional improvements we followed what we set out in last year's roadmap pretty closely.

Library enhancement was rolled out to all premium users. For listeners who have a less-than perfect metadata regime, this corrects aspects of their library and adds in extra information like artist bios. We also found time to add missing cover art, release dates and genre classifications!

We launched the iOS app and implemented storage browsing and some basic library features.

In addition to the previous roadmapped features, we also added other features and integrations driven by community requests:

This year...

The primary focus for this year is going to be development of the iOS app.

However, in addition there are some other areas that we are going to pursue that we'd also like your feedback on.

More below! 👇️

Comments

  • gravelldgravelld Administrator
    edited February 26

    The iOS app

    The iOS app is still in its early stages; currently it only allows storage browsing and playback. We've started adding "library" features; browsing albums, artists, genres and the rest.

    After that, a broad overview would be:

    • Playlist support
    • More playback options: casting; gapless etc
    • Generalising for release as open source

    ... and then basically aiming for near-feature parity with the Android app.

    I wanted to say a little something about the long term vision. Long term (and I mean that in terms of years) I expect the iOS app to become the primary Android app too. The technology that the iOS app is built in also runs on Android (and numerous other platforms) and it makes much more sense to have one codebase than multiple. Therefore in many cases I will look to defer some development of the Android app to the (current) iOS codebase. But obviously, any critical issues with the Android app that can't be addressed by the iOS one will mean it gets fixed.

    Post edited by gravelld on
  • gravelldgravelld Administrator
    edited February 26

    Library enhancement developments

    Library enhancement is already fixing album names and multi disc releases, adding missing cover art, release dates and genres and adding artist biographies and images.

    We've also taken the feedback on-board and the next milestone should have a feature which allows you to view just 'supplementary' data, e.g. artist bios and images.

    There's not much left in this project!

    We would like to add a few more items to fix. For really messy libraries, filling in or correcting missing track names and numbers for example. And taking classical forward - this is traditionally a poorly organised part of people's (not everyone's!) collections.

    As ever, all of this is additive and does not write back to your stored library. It will continue to be enable/disable-able at the click of a button.

    We'll also want to roll this out to the iOS app. It's already there in the case of fixed/filled in library data, but also the supplementary data such as artist pics and bios.

    Post edited by gravelld on
  • gravelldgravelld Administrator
    edited February 26

    So with only the iOS being the main focus, there's room for a few other medium term projects.

    In no particular order...

    Onboarding

    We appreciate this has little impact for existing users. But developments here will make it easier to find new customers and continue growing the service. Plus, in some cases the improvements could be good for existing users too.

    Think:

    • Easier storage connection and music connectivity
    • Automated library synchronisation by default

    Analytics and recommendations

    A few years ago I generated a bunch of stats for our biggest users and generated a "wrap" infographic that worked a bit like Spotify Wrapped. The biggest feedback from that was listeners would prefer to have the analytics tools to hand at all times - to see what the most played album was in the past year, favourite genres over time, and so on.

    Allied to that are recommendations. By (with permission) connecting to other services such as ListenBrainz we could generate recommendations for music, either inside your library or out.

    Integrations

    More ways of playing back your Astiga music:

    • TV - Android TV, Apple TV etc
    • Alexa
    • Plex

    Storage

    • New providers (iCloud, Proton Drive and more)
    • Easier initial connections (e.g. provide a shared folder URL)
    • Astiga's own storage?

    Family/linked accounts

    We've been getting a number of requests for separate accounts that are linked, e.g. sharing storage connections. With the new profiling feature, this can also be extended to have control over what the linked accounts can see.

    Playlists

    Playlists are one of the most used features. So there are a bunch of things to improve here, that we get feedback about:

    • Dynamic playlists, e.g. all Christmas and Frank Sinatra songs
    • Better playlist editing in the Web app: create new, create new from existing item (e.g. a genre, artist)

    Churn

    I've described before how "churn" - the number of customers who stop using the service - can impact the viability of the service.

    Part of the reason for features like the iOS app and library enhancement is to make the platform so enjoyable to use that you'd not want to stop.

    So we're looking at ways to make things delightful for our customers. No dark patterns permitted!

    Post edited by gravelld on
  • gravelldgravelld Administrator
    edited February 26

    Over to you

    We're still intending on working through existing feature requests. Generally, those with the most votes get implemented!

    Please let us know how we are getting on and what you'd like to see in the service. Feel free to do that in this thread, new threads, or directly via email: info@asti.ga

    Keep listening! 🎧️

    Post edited by gravelld on
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