Transdroid

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

After 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.

Finally, 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…

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!