I finally decided to patch the stock music player on the Y1 to show Albums under Artists
One of my biggest frustrations with this device (aside from the broken AVRCP) is the Artist navigation. Instead of showing a list of Albums by the selected Artist, the stock Y1 app jumps straight to a flat list of every song by that artist. Since the Y1 devs don't seem interested in changing this, and I have no desire to switch to Rockbox, I decided to fix it myself (begrudgingly with some help from Claude).
I've been having a bit of an existential crisis regarding the role of AI in the tech world. Instead of continuing to ignore it, I used this as a project to work alongside it. I used Claude as a "pair programmer" to help with the reverse engineering and Smali logic, forcing myself to use the AI in an agentic manner rather than just letting it do the work like some vibe coder clown.
The goal was to intercept the navigation path so that Home --> Music --> Artists --> [Artist] triggers the existing Albums UI (for only the selected artist) instead of the song list.
| Path | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Home → Music → Artists → [Artist] | Flat song list for that artist | Albums by that artist (same UI as Albums screen) |
| Home → Music → Artists → [Artist] → [Album] | N/A | Songs in that specific album, sorted by track number |
| Home → Music → Albums | All albums, unchanged | All albums, unchanged |
For my fellow nerds, the end result was a Python script that patches a version-agnostic Y1 app .apk file to support this feature. There are 3 patches.. Two Smali (compiled Java code, since we don't have the source for this thing) byte code patches to existing methods in the decompiled .apk (ArtistsActivity.confirm() and AlbumsActivity.initView()), and then one patch that changes the scope of Y1Repository.songDao() from a private method to a public method so that we can read from it elsewhere. I've only tested it on 3.0.2 and 3.0.7, but it theoretically works on any version. Patch the .apk, inject it into system.img with MTKClient, and reboot.
Wish this was the stock behavior, but alas. Anyway, here's what it looks like. Innioasis devs, please implement this navigation path.