Published by ByteHamster

For the FOSDEM conference in 2024, we wanted to share our love for AntennaPod. Who wouldn’t love some AntennaPod stickers? That’s why we asked for help from a designer, and Ryan from Freehive volunteered to help us. In the end of 2023, over the course of several months, we had weekly meetings with him. Ryan designed a refreshed version of the app icon that we released early in 2024. Most importantly, he designed stickers! In addition to a sticker with our normal app logo, Ryan’s colleague, Chris, had a bit of fun – meet Mike!

Our poll on whether you want to have Mike in the app gave mixed results. Some users loved him while others were reminded of (and maybe traumatized by) Clippy. So for now, it seems that Mike will mainly remain a sticker for AntennaPod enthusiasts. In addition, Ryan also designed a sticker specifically for contributors to show off their work on open-source software. For printing the stickers, we received some sponsoring from Sticker Mule. Early this year, we then sent out 15 postcards to contributors with a bunch of stickers and a hand-written thank-you card. This was mainly organized by @keunes who also wrote all the postcards. They turned out great!

We also got some nice feedback by the contributors when they received their letters.

At FOSDEM 2024, we handed out a lot of the stickers as well. Here, Mike went away super quickly. Looks like users love having a bit of fun with the app. Check out this picture of the sticker table, where one could find gems like Mike.

We have just ordered a fresh batch of Mike stickers, so we have a lot of them to share again. Do you want one? Find us at the 38th Chaos Commmunication Congress (38C3) in Hamburg or at FOSDEM 2025 in Brussels. While AntennaPod could not exist without contributors from all over the world, the conferences are a good chance to have a chat with core team members. If you are visiting one of the conferences, don’t hesitate to ping us on the forum, so we can meet up.

Do you want some stickers as well? On December 10, we will start the second year of AntennaPod Echo, our yearly recap of your favorite podcasts. AntennaPod Echo is generated locally on your device because we respect your privacy. If you still want to share it, we would love to see your posts on Mastodon and X using the hashtag #AntennaPodEcho! We will send out a couple of stickers to some randomly selected users sharing their year 2024 in podcasts.

Published by Keunes

It’s that time of year again — Hacktoberfest! We’re happy to announce that AntennaPod is joining this fantastic open-source event again. We’d love to see contributions from developers of all experience levels. Whether you’re new to open-source or a seasoned pro, Hacktoberfest is a great time to dive in.

What is Hacktoberfest?

Hacktoberfest is an annual celebration of open-source software. It’s a month-long event that encourages people from all around the world to contribute to open-source projects. Over the years, many AntennaPod contributors first got involved through Hacktoberfest, helping us make the app better for everyone.

For example, @RafaB6n added a warning when manually refreshing a podcast when on mobile data (#5462). @Lukmannudin fixed several bugs and made the number in sleep timer window selected when you tap on the field, so it’s easy to edit it (#6131). And @vinodpatildev brought multi-select actions to search results (#6719).

How to join Hacktoberfest with AntennaPod

Getting started is simple:

1. Sign up for Hacktoberfest on the official site.
2. Check out AntennaPod’s repository on GitHub and find issues labeled “Good first issue”. These are great starting points! Just remember to avoid issues tagged with “Needs: Decision” or “Needs: Triage”, as they may require further discussion and PRs might be closed without merging.
3. Once you’ve found your issue, leave a comment indicating to other Hacktoberfest contributors that you’ll be working on it (we can’t reserve issues for you). No need to ask for permission, but feel free to check with us if you want feedback on a specific technical implementation you have in mind.
4. Time to get started. Fork the repository, get coding, and submit your pull request!

What happens after you submit?

Don’t worry if you don’t hear from us right away. We carefully review all contributions, but it may take a few days to get feedback. Even if your PR gets merged after October, it still counts for Hacktoberfest as long as it was submitted in time.

Low- & non-code contributions welcome!

Hacktoberfest loves low- & non-code contributions, and so do we! Because AntennaPod isn’t run only by developers: Translators make our app usable by many. Active forum participants are key to helping our many users. And our branding and UX/UI contributors help give the project its special feel. Joining is simple:

1. Check our Contribute page to see how you can help.
2. Get in touch on our forum with your offer, and tag @keunes and @ByteHamster.
3. Once we’ve agreed on the contribution, get started, and deliver your contribution. There will be a blog post listing the different contributions (code & non-code). To get your contribution officially recognized, we’ll help you create a pull request to add your own name to that blog post!

Special AntennaPod rewards!

While Hacktoberfest no longer offers t-shirts, we want to show our appreciation. If you submit two or more PRs that each close an issue, you’ll get some special AntennaPod stickers as a thank you for your efforts!

We’re excited to see your contributions and can’t wait to improve AntennaPod together! Happy coding!

Published by ByteHamster

AntennaPod has been around for a long time - the first bit of code was published in 2011. Since then, the app has grown massively and had several main developers. The beauty of open-source is that so many people can contribute and make a great app together. But sometimes having many people work on a project can lead to different ways of thinking about how to structure the project. Because of this, AntennaPod gradually grew to have a number of weird code constructs. Our latest release, version 3.4, fixes this.

Bringing the problem to the table

In November 2020, @damoasda pointed us to this problem in an issue on our bug tracker. It made the situation very clear with a graph of AntennaPod’s code structure.

As you can see, the structure was one large knot. Arrows went everywhere, indicating that the different areas of the app were all connected and influenced each other. The largest problem is that there are cycles in the graph. For example, the synchronization feature accessed the database to store its changes. In turn, the database could access the playback component in case someone deletes a playing episode. To synchronize the playback position, the player could then again access the synchronization feature.

Cycles like this make it harder to create automated tests that ensure that changes do not break any existing functionality. To test the database, for example, one normally wouldn’t have to launch the full app. However, because the database basically depended on everything else, most of our tests required starting up a full Android device.

A particularly problematic aspect of the structure was that there were many “utility” classes. These are sections of code that normally do a specific task, but in our case covered various things. Such classes make it easy to just stuff everything inside, without thinking whether the code should actually be stored somewhere else. These utility classes caused many of the cycles visible in the structure.

The Big Cleanup

To clean up the code structure we started working from the graph above, identifying cycles between classes. Or, more precisely, we determined “strongly connected components” using the graph analysis tool Gephi. Given the analysis and with the help of visualizations of the code structure, we got to work.

In the beginning we mainly removed interdependencies between classes, to break the problematic cycles. Later we began grouping files using modules. A module is a collection of source code files that belong together. When some part of the code is split into a module, it stands for itself and can no longer cause cycles. @damoasda (who, as mentioned, pointed us to the problem) contributed several of the early changes.

Three years later, we now have finally completed the code restructuring. We created 62 pull requests and touched about 10 000 lines of source code – for the restructuring alone. Throughout this major undertaking, development continued. We introduced new features like local folders (2020), episode notifications, tags for subscriptions, swipe actions (all 2021), synchronization with gPodder for Nextcloud, Podcasting 2.0 chapters (both 2022) and, more recently, the Home screen and AntennaPod Echo (2023) – just to name a few.

The Result

Today, the code structure of AntennaPod looks significantly more clean, as you can see in the graph below.

All code is structured into modules that bundle closely related files. While there are still many dependencies between the modules, there are no longer any cycles: All the arrows point downwards now. Below, you can find a time lapse of the AntennaPod code structure – from the first released bits of code in 2011 to the structure today in 2024. The video was created using Gource, which is a great tool to visualize code projects over time.

In the beginning, AntennaPod started as a single module. In a large firework in the video (around 0:25), it switched to two modules in 2013, with the goal to make the app easier to maintain. However, it stayed with these two modules (app and core) for 7 years after that. The video shows that in that time many of the changes needed to touch files all over the project – because everything was connected.

From 2021 you can see the effects of our restructuring work: the two large modules slowly beginning to shrink and get replaced with a handfull of smaller modules. In a final firework of changes, we completed the restructuring in 2024. Now the code is a lot more balanced with several small modules instead of these two “arms” that could be observed between 2013 and 2021. We believe that this change wil help AntennaPod grow faster and more sustainably in the future.

When watching the video, also have a look at how many people worked on AntennaPod over the years! In the beginning it started with only Daniel, the original creator of AntennaPod. Since then, AntennaPod received contributions by over 200 people. Reading the names that flash by in the video brings up memories of great teamwork with contributors, some of which stayed for a long time. The video clearly shows how active and organic our favorite podcast app is to this day! If you are a contributor: Can you spot yourself? 🙂

The Future

The restructuring enables much easier testing, which might lead to an even more stable app in the future. New developers might need to get used to having so many modules. But it can also help getting a better overview of the code structure.

The modules make dependencies between different components of the app more explicit, and make it harder to write spaghetti code. When it comes to development, the module structure enables faster builds because the modules can be compiled in parallel. Additionally, it allows to push forward future code quality improvements gradually on a per-module basis.

We plan to further improve the code structure in future, but the biggest part of it is now completed. We hope that our final rounds of restructuring did not introduce any bugs. If you find any, we would be happy to read your report on our forum. We are looking forward to what the future will bring to a better structured AntennaPod.

Now switch over to AntennaPod and enjoy listening to your podcasts!

Published by Loucasal

With Google Podcasts quickly approaching its end of life, many of its users are looking for a new favourite podcast app. And what better time to switch to AntennaPod, the open podcast player?

Why should I choose AntennaPod? There are many podcast apps out there!

AntennaPod is designed to be simple to use, yet it gives you full control over your listening experience. It is open source, doesn’t have any ads and is free from any tracking. It supports an open podcasting ecosystem based on open standards, interoperability and accessibility.

The app is actively developed since 2011 by a small but dedicated team of volunteers, and it keeps getting better. In the last year, key new features such as the Home screen were added, and more is already under development.

Ok, I will give it a try. But the app is so different from what I’m used to…

Say no more! Here is a brief overview of where to find the AntennaPod equivalents of the screens you are already used to in Google Podcasts:

• Home: the name is the same, but AntennaPod’s Home screen does not just contain a chronological feed of the latest episodes, it is a lot more powerful and customisable! To find out more, read our blog post introducing this feature. If you are looking for a chronological list, have a look at the “Episodes” screen.
• Explore: you can access new podcasts from the Discover section of the “Add podcast” screen. In AntennaPod, you can quickly change your location to a different country directly from the Discover screen, without having to go into your settings.
• Library: each of the four screens Google Podcasts lists as part of your Library (Subscriptions, Queue, Downloads, History) is available as a separate screen in AntennaPod, with all the features you are used to and then some more!

And that’s not all: just like Google Podcasts, AntennaPod has built-in support for casting to external devices, as well as automation features (for instance, automatic downloading and deletion). Plus you will gain access to new features, such as Swipe actions to make the app behave just like you want it.

Also, if you were using the Google app solely because of Google Podcasts, note that you can now disable it and free up some storage space on your phone.

Sounds great. But I listen to a lot of podcasts and I don’t want to add them again one by one in AntennaPod!

We can promise you won’t need to do that. Here is how to export all your subscriptions and automatically add them to AntennaPod:

1. Export your Google Podcasts data in OPML format: you can do this directly from your phone, via the Export Subscriptions screen in Google Podcasts, or, alternatively, by visiting takeout.google.com and selecting Google Podcasts.

   There seems to be an issue with exporting subscriptions from the web. We strongly recommend going to the Google Podcasts app on your phone or tablet, and tap on ‘Export subscriptions’ on the Home screen.

2. If necessary, copy the OPML file to your phone (or send it to yourself via email).
3. Finally, open AntennaPod’s settings > Import/Export > “OPML import” and select your OPML file.

Your subscriptions will automatically become available in AntennaPod.

Now you’re all set for your podcast listening journey to continue. Listen away and do tell everyone about AntennaPod, just like these users:

If you appreciate your new podcast app, or even if you miss a feature you relied upon, why not come and tell us about it on the forum?

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko.

Published by Loucasal

We’ve all been there: a podcast you loved and spent many hours listening to is finally over. Understandably, you might be tempted to just remove it and move on. After all, who doesn’t want to keep their subscription list neat, tidy and quick to refresh?

However, it doesn’t have to be that way (unless you want it, of course): AntennaPod allows you to keep track of your past listens while still keeping things organised and efficient for your daily use - that is, it allows you to create your very own podcast archive. Let’s see how you can do that in three simple steps.

Step no. 1: switch off those updates

As you don’t expect new episodes to be published anymore for this podcast, you can safely disable its “Keep updated” setting. That way, AntennaPod will refresh your subscriptions faster, as it will only do so for active ones.

If you aren’t sure whether new episodes will be published, you can still refresh this podcast manually (by swiping down on that podcast’s screen or by using the refresh icon on the same screen), or toggle back the “Keep updated” setting at any time.

Step no. 2: assign a tag

From that same Podcast settings screen, or from your Subscriptions screen, edit the tags for this podcast, adding one named “Archive”.

Step no. 3: off to the archive you go!

As a final step, deselect the “Show in main list” checkbox on the Tags dialog to hide this podcast from the list that is displayed on your Subscriptions screen.

Wait, does that mean…

Yes, you got it! You can create one large archive or even several ones divided by topic, publisher, language, frequency… you name it! You can also assign multiple tags to the same podcast. And of course, you can use tags just as well to organise your active subscriptions, not just your archive.

Keeping old subscriptions also has an additional benefit: it ensures that your listening statistics remain accurate, as removed subscriptions are not counted.

What if I wanted to unarchive a podcast?

Your favourite podcast is back in action? To unarchive it, just edit its tags and (re)select the “Show in main list” checkbox. If you haven’t already, you may also need to toggle back its “Keep updated” setting to follow your global settings.

This post is part of a series highlighting some of AntennaPod’s new and existing features. Do you have any feedback on the features described in this post? Or perhaps you want to show us how you are making the most of them? Please let us know via the forum.

Photo by Valeriia Svitlini.

Published by Loucasal

One of the biggest new features in AntennaPod 3.0 (available now on Google Play and F-Droid) is the Home screen. It introduces a new way to get a quick overview, start listening and perform a range of actions. Which, in turn, allows you to enjoy the app without opening the menu to navigate between different screens.

Personalising the app experience

In addition to making navigation easier, our goal was to make the app experience more personal while respecting your privacy. So we built the Home screen around the podcasts you have already subscribed to, helping you discover and interact with content from podcasters you like and trust.

The Home screen currently contains five sections, each of which displays episodes to interact with directly, but also provides a shortcut to the related screen (e.g. your queue). Let’s look at each of the sections:

1. The first section allows you to quickly and easily ‘continue listening’ queued episodes, beginning with those you have already started listening to, but haven’t finished just yet.

2. In the second section you will ‘see what’s new’, listing the latest episodes that have landed in your Inbox when refreshing subscriptions.

3. The third section allows you to ‘get surprised’ with a random selection of episodes from your subscriptions you haven’t listened to yet. Pro tip: if you don’t see anything you feel like listening now, tap the arrow button to refresh the selection.

4. The fourth section – ‘check your classics’ – allows you to quickly open your all-time most-listened subscriptions. Warning: this might take you on a trip down memory lane.

5. In the fifth and final section you can ‘manage downloads’: that is to say, interact with the episodes you downloaded on your device.

Configuring your Home screen to best suit your needs

The Home screen, which is now set as AntennaPod’s default page, allows you to enable/disable its different sections via the three-dot menu. The screen already supports swipe actions, which you can change via the Settings » User Interface. There you can also still set a different screen as default if you prefer so.

What’s next?

What can you expect next for the Home screen? AntennaPod is a community project, so we cannot promise or predict what will be implemented when. (You are most welcome to contribute!) But we have already discussed and would love to see support for reordering sections and more advanced features.

This post is part of a series highlighting some of AntennaPod’s new and existing features. Do you have any feedback on the features described in this post? Please let us know via the forum.

Photo by Garett Mizunaka.

Published by Keunes

Almost ten months ago we announced that we would be translating our website. The app itself was translated from the get-go (starting with Russian and German), using Transifex also pretty much from the beginning.

Today, we want to up our game. We would like to make our website available in (almost) as many languages as the app. To better engage our community of translators. To localise our communication materials. And to (explore the option to) change the translation platform used for the app, so we can improve translations efficiency and quality.

We’re not in a rush and don’t have a timeline for all this. But still — it’s an ambitious programme that requires some effort. So, to make this happen, we’re looking for a volunteer that would like to take up the role of Translations Coordinator.

Who we’re hoping to find

For this role we look for someone who is

• comfortable in reading & writing in English, and maybe one or two other languages
• loves the quirks of the languages that our world is rich (such as plural forms)
• happy to devote, on average, 1 hour every week to AntennaPod
• interested in learning about (or knows already about) Transifex, Weblate and other tools we use

What this role means in practice

Are you on board? You can probably expect to be doing the following:

• send announcements to all AntennaPod translators to prepare for new (major) releases
• answer the occasional question from translators about specific texts (in Transifex or Weblate)
• add new languages in our tools and on-board new translators
• represent the translators in our community, like on the forum or our community calls
• click buttons and write language codes to get new website translations on the live website

AntennaPod is a project driven by volunteers. We do what interests us, and when we feel like it. But we try to respect the agreements we make with each-other, and let each-other know if we can’t keep to them.

Whoever will pick up this task, will of course not be alone in this effort. You’ll get support from and keep in touch with other core contributors (like @Keunes and @ByteHamster) via direct chat. Oh, and you don’t need any specific technical knowledge — as long as you’re happy to learn you’ll be fine.

What’s in it for me?

We’re all doing this for our own pleasure and entertainment. So we hope you’ll have a good time working on this together with us. And unless you’re an expert already, you’ll also learn a lot about different translation tools & processes, and build experience with community management.

With the support of our community members, we make a great podcasting experience accessible to thousands of people across the world. Will you join us? Contact @Keunes on our forum or via [username]@mailbox.org to learn more or indicate your interest.

Published by Keunes

Whether you’re subscribed to a lot of podcasts or just a handful, you want to know what’s the next thing to play. Version 2.7 of AntennaPod introduces a better way to do just that: the Inbox!

Introducing the Inbox

The Inbox displays all new episodes. As soon as you interact with an episode anywhere in the app (start playback, download, etc.), it automatically gets removed from the Inbox. At that point, after all, you’ve seen it exists and made a decision on what to do with it.

With swipe actions in the inbox, which you are invited to set up on first use, you can:

• Add episodes to the Queue
• Remove episodes from the Inbox (similar to removing the ‘new’ label in previous versions)
• Download episodes

True podcast addicts might use the Inbox as a ‘triage’ screen, manually curating episodes and swiping the best ones straight into the queue. Those who follow just 2 or 3 podcasts might check this overview of new episodes when they’re up for listening to something, and start playing an episode that looks interesting.

If you’re an existing user, you’ll notice that your inbox will be full. That’s because all episodes that had the ‘new’ label are now in your inbox. Whether you ignore the list, slowly work your way through it, or ‘remove all from inbox’ is up to you.

Not all that special

Now you wonder - what’s so special about an inbox? Don’t we already know this concept from email since the nineties?

Truth be told: yes. But none of the other major podcast apps seem to have this¹. This functionality has been developed after a request from one of our active contributors (the author of this post, as it happens), rather than by copying the other apps.

And we have to admit: even for AntennaPod, it’s not that revolutionary. Our long-time users probably already know the ‘New’ tab of the Episodes screen. The downside of the old Episodes screen was that the presence of tabs prevented the introduction of swipe actions. With swipe actions, managing new episodes is a whole lot easier.

What’s next

So far we’ve had positive feedback from our beta testers. (You can join the beta testing if you want.) But there are already ideas for further improvements. For example:

• Allow to swipe episodes from the inbox directly into an ‘ignored’ status. So that auto-download will never spend bandwidth & memory on these episodes. And podcast junkies can build stats showing which podcasts they might want to unsubscribe from.
• Introduce a ‘Skip inbox’ setting at podcast-level. Because the podcast is so great that it doesn’t need triaging. Or because it has only very few gems, and your friends will tell you about them.
• Indicate which episodes were released recently. So that you can see what’s been added to your inbox since you last opened AntennaPod.
• Add a dating app-like swipe experience. Because the list view doesn’t provide much information, while a full-screen swipe mode allows to show (part of) the description text.

It’s important to know that these are just ideas of the post’s author. No guarantees that any of these will be implemented. But more importantly: what further tweaks or features around the Inbox would you like to see? And how will you use the Inbox? Don’t hesitate to chip in on our forum to share your thoughts!

PS: there’s more to explore

The inbox is just one of the improvements that was released. Here are some other changes in 2.7:

• Use swipe actions and quickly toggle Favourites on the Episodes screen (@ByteHamster)
• View a list of (unplayed) episodes in Android Auto (@tonytamsf)
• Scroll to the top of lists by long-pressing the toolbar (@ByteHamster)
• Bug fixes around authentication for podcasts & Nextcloud sync (@ByteHamster)
• Directly open localised documentation if available (for now: da, fr, it, nl) (@ByteHamster)

Check our forum for a full list of changes.

¹ We checked Podcast Addict, Castbox and Podbean and they didn’t have an Inbox/New episodes screen with swipe actions. We wanted to try Google Podcasts but to install it you must install the Google app, so we didn’t bother.

Photo by Anne-Onyme.

Published by Keunes

Last week we published version 2.5 of AntennaPod. This update already is available via Google Play and will soon be available also on F-Droid. The key feature that we added in this release? That would be synchronisation with “GPodder Sync” app for Nextcloud, implemented by @thrillfall.

A great addition

So far AntennaPod only supported synchronisation via gpodder.net. That’s a podcasting synchronisation web tool that can be self-hosted, but which is also offered as a free service via the project’s website. Just like AntennaPod it is an open source & volunteer-run project.

Unfortunately, it has little money for its webservers, few contributors making improvements to code and a lot of people using the free service. As a consequence, its website is often down, leading to errors in AntennaPod for many people. And a considerable number of users telling us that synchronisation doesn’t work.

Now that gpodder.net was made into a Nextcloud app, you can quickly install it on your own instance. Much easier than setting up a full gpodder.net server! This not only means that open source self-hosters can easily set up their own, reliable synchronisation service. We also hope that the situation will improve for everyone else, as the pressure on gpodder.net’s central service will decrease.

You can find this new option under Settings » Synchronization!

Other changes

Synchronisation aside, we are also happy to list the following changes in our beloved podcast app:

• In the podcast-specific auto-download settings you will now also find a ‘duration’ filter (by @thomasdomingos)
• Tags can now be renamed, and they can be applied to multiple podcasts via multi-select in the Subscriptions screen (by @vbh)
• TalkBack is available in more places, increasing the accessibility of the app (by @johnjohndoe and @TacoTheDank)
• The ‘Downloaded episodes’ screen is now available in Android Auto (by @ByteHamster)
• Support for local feeds is improved, with episode sorting functionality and a better synchronisation & refreshing experience (by @ByteHamster, @shombando and @widlok)
• Physical interfaces are easier to use, both with the mouse and through keyboard shortcuts to open the app or jump lists (by @ByteHamster, @silansuslu and @tonytamsf)
• The experience with mobile connections was improved, particularly around connection permissions and warnings (by @RafaB6n, @ByteHamster and @tonytamsf)

These are only the key improvements that we managed to summarise in the limited space of Google’s ‘What’s new’ section. But there are many more bug fixes, additions and other changes in AntennaPod 2.5. We have published a full list of the record number of Pull Requests that landed in this update on our forum.

Be sure to check out the list if you’re interested, and don’t hesitate to see what you can do to help AntennaPod! The whole project is run by volunteers from across the world in their free time. So anyone who can and wants to get things done, is welcome to reach out to us and join the club.

Published by Keunes

While the app itself could already be used in 34 languages¹, the website remained in English. As the website hosts the documentation, important help and information is not easy to understand for everyone. The same goes for those website areas that integrate with the app, such the page enabling users to subscribe to a specific podcast on AntennaPod. Plus, an English-only website doesn’t help when aiming to promote the project outside an existing main user base (Germany and the US, currently).

And thus, after someone asked on our forum if and how they could translate the website into French, we set out to make that possible. It’s yet another step into making our project a bit more accessible².

That was quite a bit of work, and involved three main steps:

Step 1: choosing a translation system

A translation system makes it easy for everyone to contribute translations in their language. We already use Transifex for the translation of our app. Going there for the website too, would probably have been the easiest route.

However, we had been unhappy with some of its aspects for a while already: Transifex’ notification system (for questions from translators), user experience for requesting languages and options to reach out to translators are not ideal. Plus, it is a closed-source tool that takes financial gain from our translators as their work feeds into the Transifex translation memory.

So we set out to review the open source options. In the end we considered two: Mozilla’s Pontoon (clean user interface that’s great for translators, but Mozilla-focussed and not available for easy installation on our infrastructure) and Weblate (feature-rich though a bit harder to navigate as translator, but available for open source projects as a hosted solution - for free). We went with Weblate, and their team have been great in helping to set us up.

Step 2: making the site ready for translations

The original creator of our current website, @AnXh3L0, already had prepared the grounds for the most part. There was a language selector, and a plugin for our (Jekyll-based) website allowed for content translation. But for the site to be properly localized, everything except blog posts should be translatable – including the documentation, buttons, breadcrumb, image alt texts. Viewing a blog post shouldn’t send you back to the English version of the website. And after translation, activating a language on the live site should be easy for the website maintainers. And so, with help from very kind people outside our community, we made the site truly ready for translations.

Step 3: preparing for automation & integration

With a translation-ready website and a translation system of choice, the two had to be hooked up. Weblate can’t directly read and handle Markdown (MD) files (in which we write most website texts). The tool mdpo came to the rescue, forming a two-directional bridge between our website’s MD files and the translation files that Weblate can handle (PO or Portable Object files).

In order to make our lives easy and keep the code history clean, we wanted to strike a balance between automation and manual action. Changes to the English website texts should be sent to the translation system directly and automatically, so translators can do their work. And with the press of a button, new translations should be pushed from Weblate to the live website. GitHub Actions is the tool that allows us to do this – it runs mdpo and other tools, if certain conditions are met.

The final stage of setting up Weblate was the easy part: a matter of pointing it to the right files and adjusting a few settings (like how new languages can be added).

Over to you: contributing translations

We’ve prepared the grounds. With your help, we hope we can properly (and quickly) localise our website. Contributing as translator is easy: Simply find the AntennaPod project on Weblate.org, log in (or create an account) and start translating!

If your language is not available yet, please chip in on our forum and let us know which language we should add. Feel free to tag me (@keunes) for a faster follow-up. If you have any questions about a text (e.g. if it is a verb or noun), you can add a comment:

We hope our existing translators will join us in this effort: they know the app, which helps to ensure consistency. But whether you’re new to Weblate or haven’t used AntennaPod before: we welcome you with open arms! And don’t hesitate to tell us what you think of Weblate.

An educational experience

On a personal level, this whole process has been a very educational experience. I (@keunes) was only vaguely familiar with git, Jekyll, Liquid, GitHub actions, Weblate project management and mdpo before starting this endeavour. Many thanks to all those that kindly answered my questions in the different repositories and fora.

Are you up for a challenge too? There are plenty of other website improvements waiting to be implemented.

Photo by Daria Sannikova.

Footnotes:

Published by ByteHamster

Looking back at 2021, a lot happened in the AntennaPod community. In this blog post, we want to summarize the most important milestones.

App development

Over the course of 2021, 51 contributors helped improve AntennaPod. In total, they made no less than 505 changes (commits) to the source code, touching about 30 000 lines of code. This makes AntennaPod a pretty active project, even though it is run completely by volunteers in their free time.

To give everyone access to the app improvements, we released 9 new updates, of which 3 contained major new features. For the beginning of 2022, we have already developed a release that is nearly ready. This new release of AntennaPod – version 2.5 – will add support for synchronizing your subscriptions with your own Nextcloud instance. That makes it easier than ever to enjoy sync while still keeping your listening habits private!

Donations

After a long period of not accepting donations and users asked for it, in March this year we decided that we will accept donations. Active community members discussed what might and should not be paid for with the money, and finally developed spending guidelines. In nine months we already received € 1 263.75. The first and only spending this year was € 21.60 for a Google Play Console account (to better manage releases). We hope we can put more of the money to good use going forward.

Hello Fediverse

While already present on Twitter, in June we also joined the Fediverse and published our first toot, on Mastodon. (The Fediverse is a network of open and interacting servers, mostly used now for publishing and social interaction. This open source platform fits great with our philosophy.)

Hackathon

From July 9 to July 11, we organized the first (virtual) AntennaPod Hackathon. After an announcement and public polls on the forum, we decided on a date that fits best with the timezones that our contributors live in. We then held a kick-off meeting where we discussed which parts of AntennaPod we plan to work on next. The kick-off meeting was attended by @ByteHamster, @keunes, @Matth78, @tonytamsf and @ueen, with a short visit by @peakvalleytech. Most specifically, we discussed where we want AntennaPod’s user interface to develop in the next years. We agreed on the following long-term changes:

• Developing a home screen with a quick overview over the app.
• Adding another episode state “ignored”, which you can use if you are not interested in an episode, so you do not have to mark episodes as played that are not actually played.
• Renaming the “new” screen to “inbox” and adding it directly to the side drawer.

The Hackathon was very productive, and we will explore in which form we can continue such live contributor interaction in 2022.

Forum

As mentioned above, our forum played an important role in our community. It is the main place where everyone – from active contributors to occasional app users – meets, gets support and discusses features. We can already tell that this year well over 350 topics (discussion threads) were created, filled with more than 2 000 posts. Almost 500 users registered to the forum, bringing the total up to 700+ users. On January 1st, the great forum software (Discourse) will automatically publish a full overview of the forum activity. (So check in on our forum in a few days if you’re reading this in 2021.)

See you again next year

We hope that you had a good year, despite the global pandemic. Having to stay at home is a good time to listen to podcasts, after all 😉 Now, we wish you a good transition into the year 2022, and we will see you again next year!

PS. Don’t hesitate to create a post on our forum if you have any comments about this blog post. As said, it also is a good place to discuss new features and help shape the future of AntennaPod. And if you want to help to make AntennaPod even greater, have a look at our website where we introduce the various ways in which you can contribute to the project, such as translating or coding.

Published by ByteHamster

We are happy to announce version 2.3.0 of AntennaPod. Here is a list of notable changes that was compiled by @keunes:

• Add basic support for tagging (grouping) subscribed podcasts (#4634, #5013, #5139, @ByteHamster)
• Display chapters in the progress bar, add chapter navigation & display chapter title while seeking (#4915, #5017, #5142, @jonasburian)
• Add Contribute entry to settings screen (#5028, @peakvalleytech)
• Display Podcast Index Funding as links on the podcast info screen (#4933, @tonytamsf)
• Show queue lock button even if “keep sorted” is active (#5094, @jhenninger)
• Add pull to refresh functionality on Queue screen (#5104, @datavizard)
• New feed update interval or time dialog (#5108, @FivelMttz, @peakvalleytech & @ByteHamster)
• Merge download log & running lists (#5134, @ByteHamster)
• Don’t mark episodes as played when removing from queue (#5140, @ByteHamster)
• Fix proxy support (#5151, @ByteHamster)
• New media player screen (#5075, @ueen, @jonasburian & @ByteHamster)

AntennaPod is developed by volunteers in our free-time. If you like AntennaPod and want to give something back to the community, consider contributing by helping other users in the forum, translating or by writing code.

Published by ByteHamster

User feedback is vital to building a great open-source app. Having a direct channel to users helps to solve questions and makes the overall experience of AntennaPod better. Celebrating one year of the AntennaPod forum, this blog post describes how the forum was born.

Before 2020, the main feedback channel for AntennaPod was a Google Group. A Google Group is basically an email list that you can subscribe to. The group was rather confusing to use - it was full of people asking the same questions over and over, and also had technical difficulties where replies were sometimes not sent to all users. A really important aspect that I only realized later was that the group did not have a friendly and personal atmosphere. Writing there mostly involved email addresses and the humans behind the addresses were not in focus.

A second feedback channel was the GitHub repository. Aimed at developers, GitHub is great to coordinate development but not so great to help users find what they are looking for. Vivid discussions with quotes and images are a bit harder to manage there, too. Lastly, when many of the notification emails are related to answering questions again and again, development is slowed down because it is easy to miss important information.

In the end of 2019, I met with other open-source Android developers and discussed how to connect with users more easily. In May 2020, I set up the AntennaPod forum using the wonderful open-source software Discourse. In June, the forum was finally ready to be used and I invited @keunes, who was doing a lot of user support - the AntennaPod forum was born!

When we did our big user survey about a new icon for AntennaPod 2.0.0 in July 2020, the last page of the survey spread the word about the forum. This was when it really started to grow. Until today, 478 users have joined and the page is visited around 600 times each day. In 347 topics, we discussed proposals for new features, helped users with the app and fixed bugs. In total, 3213 posts were created (that’s more than 9 each day) and the like button was pressed 1168 times.

In my opinion, the forum is one of the best changes to AntennaPod since I became involved with development in 2017. It finally creates a strong bond between the people working together to create one of the best podcast apps. Actually, I wonder how we even managed to work on AntennaPod without the forum just about one year ago.

If you are not registered yet, you are warmly invited to join now. You can get an early look at new features and shape the future of AntennaPod by participating in discussions. Beyond code on GitHub and translations on Transifex, the forum offers a new way to contribute to AntennaPod. You can help other users and get help, without being familiar with the code and technical details.

Happy discussing!

Published by ByteHamster

We are happy to announce version 2.2.0 of AntennaPod.

• Optional notifications for new episodes (@connectety)
• Use PodcastIndex for main search (@tonytamsf)
• Sleep timer extend buttons (@max-wittig)
• Optional rewind, forward & skip buttons on widget (@tonytamsf)
• ‘When not favorited’ as Episode Cleanup (@spacecowboy)
• More actions for hardware buttons (@timakro)
• Android Auto & chapter support (@tonytamsf, @ByteHamster)
• Fixed stuck notification (@a1291762)
• Player screen usability for visually impaired (@ByteHamster)

AntennaPod is developed by volunteers in our free-time. If you like AntennaPod and want to give something back to the community, consider contributing by helping other users in the forum, translating or by writing code.

Published by ByteHamster

We are happy to announce version 2.1.0 of AntennaPod.

• A long-standing wish of many: playing local files! In the ‘Add podcast’ screen simply tap ‘Add local folder’ and select a location on your phone! (by @ByteHamster, @igoralmeida & @damoasda)
• Pick a country for the ‘Discover’ screen (by @tonytamsf)
• Keyboard shortcuts (by @flxholle)
• Search the PodcastIndex.org database (by @edwinhere)
• Pull to refresh (by @flxholle)
• Playback speed & filter dialogs (by @ByteHamster & @bws9000)
• Smooth sleep timer volume (by @olivoto)

AntennaPod is developed by volunteers in our free-time. If you like AntennaPod and want to give something back to the community, consider contributing by helping other users in the forum, translating or by writing code.

Published by ByteHamster

The old AntennaPod website was pretty basic. Its FAQ section was outdated and did not follow the design of the rest of the page. Additionally, the FAQ page was linked nowhere – if you did not know where to look, you did not find it. Links to platforms for contribution (GitHub for development, Weblate for translations and the forum) were hidden in a small footer menu. The website highlighted a few features but it did not describe how to use them. Additionally, the website was a plain html file, making it rather hard to update. You can find the old website on the internet archive.

After noticing the awesome redesign of the website of K-9 Mail (open-source email app), I reached out to the designer of that website, Anxhelo Lushka. Anxhelo offered to create a brand new website, specifically for AntennaPod! You are currently looking at our new website. It has more features, like a documentation section and a blog. The website is not completely finished yet. If you discover problems, just let us know on the forum!

Published by ByteHamster

Version 2.0.0 is a big step forward for AntennaPod. We rewrote big parts of the user interface, added tons of new features and fixed bugs.

• Brand new user interface (by @ByteHamster)
  We got rid of unnecessary icons and unnecessary whitespace. You can now see more podcast episodes on your screen and it looks more tidy. Don’t worry - AntennaPod still has the same feel and the way you interact with the app has not changed. It just looks more polished!
• Support for chapter images (by @ByteHamster)
  When loading new episodes of a podcast, AntennaPod now supports displaying chapter images. Just play an episode that supports images, head over to the chapters tab on the player screen and have a look!
• Skip intro and ending per feed (by @tonytamsf)
  The option is located in feed settings, which you can get to by pressing the cogwheel icon on the feed page.
• Option to show notifications after episodes have been auto-downloaded (by @shortspider)
  This is one step into the direction of our most requested feature: being notified for new episodes.
• Bug fixes and improvements (by @ebraminio, @tonytamsf, @JessieVela, @ByteHamster and more)
  We have fixed too many things to list them all. They include things like better support for right-to-left languages or fixes when jumping to positions in an episode.

You can see the full, huge list of changes on our development platform, GitHub.

As of writing this, version 2.0.0 is rolled out to 100% of the Google Play users. At the same time, the first beta release of version 2.1.0 is rolled out to our beta testers. AntennaPod is developed by volunteers in our free-time. If you like AntennaPod and want to give something back to the community, consider contributing by helping other users in the forum, translating or by writing code.

Published by ByteHamster

To all those who participated in the vote for our new brand: THANK YOU! With a total of 6420 votes we have seen a great interest from our community. We’ll get to all their opinions in more detail later, but first things first:

It is with great pleasure that we can announce the new AntennaPod app icon and logo by 221pxls!

The competition

In total, we received 12 proposals. You can find a full list of proposals in a post on Open Source Design. After the call closed we (@keunes and @ByteHamster) reviewed all proposals and provided feedback to the designers. Based on the criteria and requirements set out in the design brief, two proposals were selected for the community vote.

After that, we set up a vote containing the two new proposals that follow the requirements in our design brief best, as well as providing an option to vote for the old design. Voters could give one to five stars for each design, representing an equal number of points.

Alpha	Bravo	Charlie
By MyNameIsTroll	By 221pxls	Old
21314 total points	23323 total points	21718 total points

The charts

The total points listed above gives a straightforward indication of the winner. But we wanted to look into the votes in more detail to better understand how each of the proposals was received.

Apart from the total score we found it interesting to see how many users accept a proposal, even if it’s not their favourite. The plot below shows that 60% of the users generally like proposal bravo, while fewer than 50% like the other proposals.

Also noteworthy is that 42 users loved all proposals, giving each a five star rating. On the other side, luckily only four users did not like any of the proposals and gave them all 1 star. The old design (charlie) invoked the most strong opinions, with 4% of the voters awarding the existing design 4 or 5 stars while giving the other proposals only 1 or 2 stars.

Differences per group

The survey was shared among different groups: Google Play Beta users, our Twitter followers, a random group of Google Play users, and our F-Droid users. For each of these groups we distributed another link to the poll. Below, you can see the rating distribution across different groups. For each group, the bravo proposal was rated best. You can also see the number of participants form each group.

The poll was open for a bit more than a month. The F-Droid users replied so fast that after 3 days we already had 3328 participants and closed that collector again. For Google Play users, the poll was opened for more than a month to get a more equal distribution between different types of users. The poll was rolled out to 16,000 random users on Google Play, out of which 12,700 installed the update and 1994 voted.

You can find additional interesting charts here: icon-poll-charts.pdf. If you want to have a look at the raw, anonymized vote data to create your own charts, you can find it here: vote-data-ratings.csv. The R script used to generate above charts is available here: icon-poll-charts.R.

Text comments for an evening or three

We know - it’s been quite a wait for those of you who were looking forward to these vote results. In respect of both our community and the hard work of both designers, we wanted to go through all the comments and relay relevant feedback to the designers. So, over the span of several evenings @keunes and @ByteHamster went through over 4000 open comments.

Each comment was tagged with one or more categories. After initial tagging we reviewed the list with categories, and made some adjustments to improve our tags. Unfortunately that took a bit longer than preparing the script for the graphs. But the result are the insightful word clouds below! (You can click on them to view a bigger version. We have used a non-linear scale for the word clouds to ensure that both frequently noted and rarely noted words are readable)

Alpha	Bravo	Charlie

After the comment box for each of the proposals we also asked respondents if they wanted to leave a generic comment. Many of them thanking the developers for their good work. Going through all those comments was heart-warming.

Let us share a small collection of the many nice comments below. Dear all volunteers, developers, translators – let this speak to you!

You, reading this, good work. Hope your day is as good as you’ve helped make mine all by having a nice functioning app experience

I’ve never been more excited for a software update before.

Thanks for AntennaPod! It’s incredible! You certainly would have reason to feel proud of your accomplishments there! A great example where Free Software excels!

Thanks for making this great software! You provide an essential service to many of us and should sleep well at night knowing you’re positively contributing to our world. Thank you!

Some of the plain-text comments contained support questions or feature requests. Given that we don’t know who sent these comments (it’s a survey, after all) it’s not possible to reply to them, but rest assured that we’re keeping them in the back of our minds. If you did have a support question, feature request or bug report, please create a topic in our new forum so we can help you :)

If you want to have a look at the tagged comments data (not the actual comments) to create your own charts, you can find it here: vote-data-comments-tagged.csv. The R script used to generate above charts is available here: comments.R.

Post-vote changes

As we wrote in the design brief, we provided important feedback to the designer of the winning proposal based on the open comments, taking the opportunity to tweak the design slightly. The logo presented at the top of the page is the final result of these iterations.

Before we let you enjoy your podcasts, we want to thank again all the designers that replied to call on Open Source Design, and in particular MyNameIsTroll and 221Pixels. We hope that you - our community - are happy with the result of this process and will warmly adopt our new face. We will soon release the official release of version 2.0.0 which will include the updated visuals.

Published by Keunes

After users requested a new icon for over 5 years, I persuaded main developer ByteHamster that the release of version 2.0.0 is a good time to rework the icon. We therefore developed and published a design brief with requirements for the new icon. You can find the design brief below.

Design brief AntennaPod logo update

About AntennaPod

AntennaPod is a podcast manager and player for Android. Contrary to many of its competitors, it is open source (MIT License), developed and translated by volunteers, gratis and ad-free. It allows users to discover new podcasts, download, stream and manage episodes, and launch playback with personal settings and on a range of different devices. It is translated in 17 languages with more than 90% completion (and even 25 languages with over 60% completion). With over half a million downloads via Google Play, AntennaPod is installed on more than 150,000 actively used devices.

Assignment & scope

The app’s current main developer is currently working on AntennaPod version 2, an important update with lots of bug fixes and UI improvements. To honour this major step, we are looking for a new logo and app icon. The goal of the new design is to help give AntennaPod a modern and professional look, which is in line with the updated UI and speaks to the wider audience (beyond open source and privacy advocates).

• The logo will be used on the website and in the app
• The icon will be used for the installed app, in app stores and for social media accounts
• Both the full logo and the icon may also be used in potential future communication materials (including print)
• Secondary assignment is the delivery of simple colour palette is also expected, as to ensure future consistency
• Ideas are welcome, but not necessesarily in scope of this assignment, for:
  • new promotional visuals (hopefully produced following new logo, to announce v2 of the app)
  • design ideas for a new, modern website (hopefully done in the not too distant future)

Design requirements

The new work must:

• contain the name: “AntennaPod” (only for logo)
• use a libre font (so any contributor can create new comms materials)
• still be recognisable as AntennaPod by existing users, and therefore, must
  • have blue as primary or secondary colour (any shade, same as or different from current)
  • somehow use the concept of an antenna in the icon
• come positive & negative version (for on light & dark background)
• adhere to Google Play icon design specifications (only for icon)
• also come in super small white-on-transparent version legible in super small size (icon only, for Android’s status bar)
• be deliverd in vector format (preferably svg, as not all an open AI files)

The current logo icon

The competition

As you can see below, there’s both some variety and a bunch of same-ish icons. Our aim is to get something unique :-)

License

Designs are provided with an unlimited and unrevokable license to the AntennaPod project, allowing its use and future adaptations/iterations. The licensed product (the designs) will be used as the project’s (unregistered) trade mark(s) and used and embedded as such in the project’s products (website, app, etc). (cf Trademarks in Open Source)

Feedback, iteration, selection

Keunes (comms) and ByteHamster (lead developer) are responsible for guiding the process. Keunes will be the contact person for the designer(s).

As a community project, contributing users and others interested will have an important role. To that end, the ‘active community’ will be involved (in a restricted manner, as described below). With ‘active community’, we refer to all beta users of the app (3.4k), those following a GitHub issue on the topic (13+) and those following the project on Twitter (867).

• First round. After the call for proposals, one to three are selected by Keunes & ByteHamster. Feedback is provided to selected proposals. New iterations based on the feedback (if any) are expected.
• Second round. The new iterations (and those that stayed the same) are put up for a vote by the active community. Participants will rate each of the proposals, and optionally provide open comments on their favourite proposal. To make sure the winner is validated as better than the current icon, the current icon will also be included. For the most popular proposal, relevant comments will be filtered and bundled by Keunes and provided to the designer. Based on the feedback (if any), an iteration is welcomed but not required.

The community will need to sign in with their Google account to be able to vote, in order to avoid malicious votes. Users without Google account are offered an alternative.

Timeline

We’d love to hear from you by Wednesday 24 June if you’re interested to help out (or if you have any questions or comments). The deadline for the proposals will be Saturday 27 June. ByteHamster and Keunes will then select proposals & provide feedback by the following Wednesday. After, we’ll have two weeks for iterations (if any) and launching the poll in the Beta version of the app on Thursday 16 July. We then hope to be able to implement our new icon by the end of the month :)

Financial thank-you

As a project without official structure or own funds, proper compensation won’t be possible. However, as to support open source designers, Keunes would like to offer € 25 to those selected in the first round, plus € 50 to the selected logo. Designers may also decline the offer, in which case their financial thank-you will be donated to the Open Source Design initiative.

Of course you’d be acknowledged by name on the site and in the app’s ‘About’ section.

Interested? Contact us!

Thank you for considering support to this open source app! Reply to the ad on opensourcedesign.net or get in touch at [email address removed].

Published by ByteHamster

Supporting old Android versions is hard. Vendors only publish updates for a limited time and the devices’ software decays while the actual hardware would still work great. To look for new episodes, AntennaPod needs to connect to the servers of podcast publishers. While the servers are upgraded to modern cryptography standards, the old devices lack behind. Especially devices with Android versions older than 5.1 are getting more and more trouble fetching new episodes.

To deal with problems like that, Google published a workaround. While AntennaPod is open-source software, Google’s workaround is not. This is not a problem for Google Play users – they received the workaround in the 1.8.0 update. F-Droid only allows to publish 100% open-source apps. The contributor @Slinger has now developed a workaround for F-Droid users. This workaround makes the app size bigger but it fixes various problems. If you are using F-Droid and are wondering why version 2.0.0 needs more space, here here is the explanation.

You can find a more technical explanation on the F-Droid blog, which also explores ways to deal with the problem without making the app size bigger.