2.6.0

[arianneorpilla]

This release implements a variety of bug and quality of life improvements to improve the stability and overall consistency of the user experience, and removes non-free dependencies.

System Requirements: This application has been tested to work on a variety of devices and emulators running Android 7 to 13. Please note that a significant amount of internal storage space may be taken up by the dictionary database for indexing in order to optimize query speed and performance. Try to give the application around 2-4GB of storage space. Make sure your Android WebView is updated before use. This will resolve common issues that may occur with ッツ Ebook Reader or Mokuro.

🗺️ New directions

2.6

📺 Player Improvements

• Tuned the conditions for toggling the visibility of the bottom bar to reduce user error when the subtitle position changes.
• Added a new option for users to adjust background opacity and blur radius, and subtitle outline width.
• Added network caching for the YouTube and Network Stream media sources, which should significantly improve buffering speed and band-aid issues with seeking.
• Fixed an issue where subtitle options would persist across sessions even if a user has selected to set instead of save settings.

📖 Reader Improvements

• Updated ッツ Ebook Reader to include changes from current upstream.
• Added an appropriate user-facing message to inform the user when the local assets server cannot be started because of ports already in use. The app will also now re-try every five seconds, and has an appropriate screen to handle this scenario.
• Fixed a critical issue that prevented users from importing new books or a backup if the WebView cache has been cleared.

⚙️ Miscellaneous Improvements

• The app now preloads for wildcard searches, which should make initial searches faster.
• Fixed an issue for some devices where the app may not switch to using a fallback directory for image export and will halt on user startup.
• Fixed a significant number of inconsistencies with dialog padding and scrollbars which are more apparent in landscape mode, especially when using a keyboard.
• Instant lookup and using the Card Creator quick action in the ChatGPT app will now constrain within a sentence rather than using the entire message for card export. Users may still select specific text or get the entire text with the Card Creator button.
• Fixed a possible gray screen when the app shuts down after being launched with a share intent.

🕊️ Free and Open Source

• Removed Firebase dependencies from the project to meet F-Droid submission requirements.
• From now on, new releases will be tagged properly per version, and changelogs for hotfix versions will be in their own tagged releases.
• Telemetry has been removed from the app, and a file-based logging system has been implemented in its place.
• Should users require developer support, logs can be found in the app's own folder in the Android/data directory.

📝 Some ponderings

Though this list is a sure contrast to what I have ended up doing with the 2.5 changelog despite stating my intent to slow things down, it does reflect what I think is the direction to take with this project. Going through multiple rewrites over the past years, and getting a new media source, enhancement, feature and whatnot one after the other has allowed me to reach this state with the app.

I feel at this point that my app has certainly become a complete package befitting the claim that I've written for this repository's caption. There are still many things that I feel I can do, that I have wanted to do with the project back then at the time, but couldn't due to other non-starter issues.

Now that I am very much happy with things like dictionary performance, and the variety of media that I support, I can start working on other pursuits like better user and developer documentation and so forth. I would like to improve the app in terms of the everyday - it must be stable, capable and future-proof as a personal workflow, as well as a technology project for the long-term.

This app now also removes Firebase dependencies to meet requirements for submission into F-Droid, which I am in the process of doing at the moment. This means that I won't easily get telemetry to fix issues as soon as possible as I would have in the past, but logging is now in its place. I honestly feel like I was able to make tremendous use of the Firebase suite in terms of being able to respond, find and patch out issues quickly, as well as seeing the current user count by country was incredibly motivating - But there are other ways, and I'd like to try them. I feel that free and open source is the way to go forward after all.

I've made a mess uploading version on top of version in the same tag in the past. I've decided to change things up a bit and clean up going forward with new releases, which means that I can't be as frantic as I have been in the past releasing one hotfix after another and re-uploading a lot, which also means that the changelog won't be as busy as it is for each major version. Anyway, I think that's about it! I thought a little about sharing what I have in mind for the future, but I think showing is better than telling in that regard.

Again, thank you for your continued support.

📲 Which file should I download?

The universal APK below will work for all device architectures, but per-architecture installation packages are also provided below which are smaller and more convenient in file size.

As a rule of thumb, arm64 should work for most modern mobile devices. armeabi should work on older devices. Generally, desktops and emulators should use x86_64.

Depending on which device you are using, download the appropriate APK by expanding the Assets drop-down below and install on your mobile phone by launching the APK with your file explorer.

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This discussion was created from the release 2.6.0.