10 years old

Who would have ever thought… Transdroid is 10 years old!

On 25 february 2009, the very first apk went public, asking people for feedback. A release in the – then called – Android Market followed soon. It really was just build for myself, but with positive feedback the app and user base started growing…

It all started very humle. Android 1.0 was just launched, and the T-Mobile G1 was the only phone available. Interface design was skeumorphic or non-existing, and 3G only barely rolled out in cities.

Over time, the app did get bigger. Many new torrent clients got supported, multiple configurations, home screen widget, SSL connections, ‘high-res’ icons, RSS feeds, in-app search… When the time for a 1.0 came the app was much used and had over 250.000 downloads. Quite an achievement at that time.

It wasn’t until 2011 that I finally marked a version 1.0, indeed being pretty much feature-complete and stable. And then it got removed from the Play Store… a big blow at first. We didn’t do anything wrong, and certainly other apps were doing the same thing? But alas, the app stayed available and forever since almost all users get the app from my site or F-Droid.

Development never stopped, for sure. Phones without a physical menu button arrived – crazy! – so a fancy action bar came along with some colour. In 2012 the app got a tablet interface – all the hype back then.

It wasn’t until Transdroid 2, with a major UI rewrie, that a Holo theme followed, now coming in white as default, with black being an option. This eventually morphed into the Material theme that Transdroid still uses today.

So what’s in the future? Yes, the project is in maintenance mode. I don’t really have the drive and time right now to do major work, and apart from the random fix for new Android versions or update to the Search library, not much is going on. Perhaps one day I find the enthousiasm to properly rework the app. Perhaps ourside contributors can revive the spirit.

But whatever happens, I don’t see myself dropping the hundreds of thousands users. In fact, the app has more users than ever, I belief, and I care for them as much as 10 years ago. Fixes may be slow, but they will come. Perhaps even a small feature here and there – no promises. Thank you very much, to all of you, who used the app, spread the word, filed feature requests and bugs, even contributed code and translations.

Thank you all!

Eric

Material is here

Transdroid 2.5.1After a long time of some mere bugfixes, following by a long time of slow work on the promised refresh… Transdroid 2.5 is finally here!

The obvious change in the new Material design. Both light and dark themes are now styled in the design language that was introduced in Android Lollipop. While more is to come, the app should feel a little more modern in both graphical appeal and feel. As always, feel free Transdroid on GitHub!

Under the hood I have solved an array of bugs and incompatibilities. User of rTorrent, qBittorrent or Aria2? The new versions should be compatible with the latest and greatest of your favourite torrent client. Translations have been updated too. The Search Module was also improved. Several private and public trackers have been added for your direct search pleasure.

Transdroid 0.13 from 2009Finally, for now, I am updating the website and documentation. Some of it is from 2009 still. And I think you’d agree that SOME things have changed since then…

Hold on while I Materialize a refresh

Just a quick update to let everyone know I am working still on the app. The last time has been busy and most development has been quite behind the scenes, as I am working on a small visual refresh of the app. Well small… it is getting a Material design look to match the Android Lollipop visuals and some parts needed a bit of tweaking to get right with those new and changed idioms.

A beta version should be available fairly soon, within a week or two. After that I will focus more on bugfixes again to update support for some clients (rTorrent, qBittorrent, tTorrent) and long standing annoyances. Hold on just a bit more!

Some private tracker love

I just released Transdroid 2.1.3. It includes bug fixes, such as for the rTorrent file upload restriction, but more importantly it supports the new Torrent Search 2.0. With the 2.0 release of the Search module I introduced support for private sites to function just as the public sites that were already supported nicely, fully integrating in the search feature of Transdroid and other apps.

When you open the new Torrent Search interface you can enable and disable public sites in case you are not interested in their content, and Transdroid will not show them in the search results. More importantly, you can provide the credentials to private trackers that you have an existing account for to get the same smooth search experience in Transdroid for your private sites.

Since every private tracker will have a different code and login method, support for each of them has to be custom build. Currently I only support IPTorrents and Bit-HDTV. If you have a private site that you like support for, you may either implement it yourself of course if you know some Java (you can use the IPTorrents class to start) and send me a pull request on GitHub. It is quite simple really. No coding skills (or lazy)? If you provide me with an account I might add it myself — although my time is very limited so I can give no guarantees.