Hi all,
The other day, I posted here asking about recommendations on audiobooks servers and clients for iOS, and I got so many nice and very helpful responses from you all. I really, really appreciated the sense of community and help that you all showed me. Some of you mentioned Android clients and I checked them out since I do have an Android phone and the iOS one was for my wife. I appreciated the two Android clients I saw, the official ABS and Lissen but they weren’t what I was looking for (with the utmost respect to their developers of course).

A kind soul here recommended the app Still for iOS. I checked it out and it was such a nice app. The wife loved it too. I was bummed that it was iOS only. So, I decided to make one for Android (with the help of AI for transparency of course). I’ve been working on it nonstop for over 2 weeks now. When I say nonstop, I mean I stay up until 1AM daily working on it. I’ve got something working really well now.

I wanted to share that with you all in the hope that someone will find it useful. It’s completely free and open source (GPLv3). Completely private. Nothing leaves your device beside the calls the app makes to your own server. I won’t ask for donations or anything. I just want to share. I welcome any feedback and contributions.

Get it here and let me know.

Edit: screenshots are in. I welcome any feedback/github bug reports so I can make the app better. This is an app I now use daily for hours so I won’t mind any bug reports that I don’t catch myself.

Thanks for your work!

That being said they will hate it. If any ai Ia involved they will dismiss not only it but you and it's a really irritating habit that is starting to emerge.

See this comment https://feddit.org/comment/11882982

How would a dummy like myself install this app on Android? I've never installed an app from github on my phone

Got it going. Very slick, I like the interface a lot. And the finer grain playback speed and audio boost is a great addition

Click on the release (green thingy after description) and download apk

Try obtanium if you want to automate updates, otherwise just download the APK and open the file.

Thanks!

I'm not sure what could happen but I wouldn't do that with a brand new app like this

I've been using the official ABS app in Android for a while now and am curious what exactly makes it fall short?

I'm a software developer and it would have to be severely lacking for me to invest the time in sitting down and create a new one, even with AI tools. But that may be more of a disadvantage.

Sounds cool though, I haven't seen Still and it would be nice with some screenshots.

That’s ok. I’m very much upfront about it. I’m not selling and making money, nor will I ever even ask for donations. I use AI for building things only for myself and literally have never shared with anyone before because I know some folks just don’t like it. But this one was too good not to share. It’s out there, and those who hate AI aren’t forced to use it. Is that fair?

Functionality wise, the official one works no problem. It’s the UI. I’m a visual person and like eye candy. I liked how the iOS app Still looked, so I thought why not? Wanted to have fun with it. That’s all :)

Edit: I’ll be adding screenshots soon.
Edit 2: screenshots are now in.

Why are there no screenshots in the README.

Yes I know I can just install the app, but for an app that primarily seems to define itself by its UI improvements over the established competitor, the screenshots are the deciding factor in the question "Should I download and install this?", and no screenshots defaults to "no".

I agree with you 100%. This is on me. I’ll be putting screenshots there as soon as I get home. I just kept hammering at the app and forgot about the screenshots. Good call out.

No plaza stop button on the notification menu when the phone is locked

I can't speak for everyone with my comment here. I really, really hate the side effects of the AI bubble. Where they force it into every fucking element of life. And honestly, I hate even that it's being called AI. I hate that it's made traditional algorithmic services worse like Google Now for example. And I hate the lack of privacy it's brought.

That said, I have no problems with someone using it to complete a project with it. I think it could potentially raise a potential device security concern in a case like this. And probably wouldn't partake in the app because of that. But I use my own self-hosted LLMs all the time. It helps me format things, saves me time with searching and researching when I want an answer, not knowledge.

There are many rational reasons to dislike and avoid "AI". As well, there's many irrational people. And there are some good uses for the technology.

Screenshots are in.

You got it running? You good? Also, I’m happy that you like it. When I make something for myself, I make sure I love it, otherwise, I wouldn’t share it at all. Let me know if you need any help.

If any ai Ia involved they will dismiss not only it but you and it’s a really irritating habit that is starting to emerge.

It's perfectly understandable. It used to be that a project that had the appearance of a significant amount of work and polish put into it could be reasonably trusted. With the rise of LLMs, that assumption has gone completely out the window as people can churn out appealing looking slop in record time. In addition, LLMs are dominated by the most transparently evil tech companies in existence, and the fully open models aren't yet good enough, and are still built on the backs of the absurd amount of energy usage used to train the models.

That all being said, I don't think the OP is being malicious and I appreciate the disclosure but I'd give this project a year of maintenance before I would reasonably trust it.

am curious what exactly makes it fall short?

The podcast playback is sorely lacking. It can't play more than one episode without having to select the episode, which makes playlists kinda pointless unless it's just following one storyline in a podcast that runs more than one concurrently. It also doesn't seem to support defaulting listing order other than newest, and the next episode is always the latest, despite the current playback order

Trust Is a different issue and I agree with you that I wouldn't just install this.

Good work! And thanks for the Still iOs tips 😊

Awesome! And good job, looks great!

I can understand that. Even coming up on my first decade working as a dev I still love it an occasionally do some projects on my spare time. LLMs have made hobby projects so much more achievable and there's something very rewarding being able to make something yourself.

Thanks for the screenshots, looks good!

Oh, I don't listen to podcasts so I wasn't aware it was this lacking. Understandable wanting something else in that case.

Looks awesome, any chance that you put this on fdroid?

Thank you. I was actually thinking of that. I’ll need to find out how and then will go for it for sure.

Thank you

Of course :)

Thank you and absolutely. And I feel even better when the people I share my work with, like it.

Please do it, there is a big part of the foss community that only install apps from fdroid, including me.

Request has already been submitted to their gitlab page :)
And if they for any reason rejected it, I’ll host my own repo and then it can be added to fdroid