A little teaser for everyone who has been chasing me for carplay support. It is coming! I am making progress!

It's a real pain in the ass development experience though, it's very restrictive and there are very few good examples around to refer to for what you can and can't do and how to do it. Also working with react-native adds an extra layer of complication that you need to think about but I have made good progress. In development I can launch substreamer from the head unit, browse and play music without ever touching the phone which is actually pretty cool the first time you do it.

The thing that makes this so time consuming is really the ability to test. You can ONLY test on the ios simulator with it's built in carplay function which has known issues with playback state and a few other things so you spend so much time chasing your tail trying to fix things only to eventually stumble across a reddit post or a github issue on some other random repo confirming it's a simulator issue. It would make the development experience so much easier if you could just go buy a car headunit with carplay and android auto and sit it on your desk and test against it (which was my plan before realising it wouldn't work).

My application is in with Apple for the substreamer carplay entitlement and once they grant that I will be able to test again real headunits which will make things move along faster.

Don't worry I haven't forgotten android auto either, it is also implemented in parity with carplay with all the same functionality. That's been it's own magical journey...

https://preview.redd.it/mi81dj5rvu0h1.png?width=1578&format=png&auto=webp&s=5618c22263dc2479bfde98f1c530d95fe8e16aa1

Substreamer 8.0.56 — Hotfix release with a lot under the hood

Hey everyone,

8.0.56 is rolling out now, and while the version number suggests a small hotfix series, this run (8.0.53 → 8.0.56) is actually packed with refinements. The focus has been on hardening Music Downloads v2 and Image Cache v2, squashing some nasty Android and iOS crashes, and a complete rebuild of the cover art color extraction pipeline. Plus a few UX wins that make day‑to‑day use feel a lot smoother.

Here's what's new.

Music Downloads v2 — partial album support

Big improvements to how downloads behave when an album isn't fully cached:

• Partial album state is now first‑class. Albums that are missing tracks show a clear partial state (orange downloaded icon!)
• Top‑up any partial album with a single tap to fill in the missing tracks.
• New filter in Settings → Appearance lets you show or hide partial albums in your offline browsing — your call, it's disabled by default
• Music cache browser has been updated to surface partial albums and gives you a quick and easy way to back fill any missing tracks or refresh any downloaded track that might have an issue manually
• This is all groundwork to enable song based library browsing and song downloading

Download queue, now where you'd expect it

Whenever there are items in the download queue, the download queue indicator now appears on every screen where the MiniPlayer is visible. No more wondering if a download is still going while you browse — it's right there.

Image Cache v2 — more robust and self‑healing

• Recovers blank cover art from broken cache entries automatically.
• Unsticks incomplete rows so partial cache failures don't permanently ghost an image, with clear repair feedback.
• Brand new Android image resize path via a custom local module, replacing a flaky plugin that was slow, causing missing thumbnails and worst of all causing app crashes!
• Image cache scan in Settings now shows a spinner so you know it's working.
• Image cache will auto repair damaged or missing cached images, but there is also a manual scan and repair function exposed in settings

Cover art color extraction — fully custom, more consistent everywhere, light & dark theme aware

This was a big one. The old react-native-image-colors plugin has been completely replaced with a custom expo-image-colors module built specifically for Substreamer. Wins:

• Consistent results across iOS and Android — same palette, same vibe, no platform surprises
• Light/dark mode aware with deliberate contrast skews so header buttons stay readable against any cover

Player fixes

• Bulletproof queue resume on cold start — open the app and your queue is exactly where you left it
• MiniPlayer and the main player progress bar share a single source — no more drift between the two
• Local play count and last‑played update immediately on scrobble instead of waiting for the next refresh
• Expanded player tabs reordered to Queue / Info / Lyrics, matching the bottom tab bar in the smaller player screen

Library

• Article‑stripped sorting — your library now respects the server's article list, so "The Beatles" sorts where you'd expect it
• Cleaner list rows with fixed‑width metadata slots for consistent alignment
• Home screen listening time auto‑scales to days for those of us with heavy totals
• Light mode skeleton loaders are now actually visible (oops)

Crash and stability fixes

• Android: MIUI / Redmi notification controls fix — remote controls should now work reliably on Xiaomi devices (re #87)
• Android: ANR fix caused by repeated locale formatting in lists (Hermes #867)
• Android: edge‑to‑edge safe area handling is much improved
• Android: image‑related Fresco crash suppressed
• A handful of smaller iOS rendering edge cases ironed out

Translations

• Full Traditional Chinese (zh‑Hant) translation pass done from the zh‑Hans baseline
• Refreshed translations across multiple other languages with a terminology consistency pass.

As always — thank you for using Substreamer, for the bug reports, the feature requests, and the kind words. A lot of the fixes in this release came directly from issues you raised. Keep them coming.

Update should be live on both app stores now (or very soon when reviews all finalise). If you spot anything weird, drop a note here or open an issue on GitHub.

🎧