4,000n Active Installs

There are now over 4,000 active installs of the main version.  Feedback remains positive too.

Released 2.3.10 to market

Comments reached 100 on the main app.  The Android 2.1 version is slowly dropping active installs, thank goodness.  I am hoping to just dump it completely before the end of the year as the vast majority of devices are now Android 2.2 or higher.  The ratings are mostly positive for the main app too.

I released 2.3.10 last night.  The only change was to complete issue 64: have the SMS reader read out the contact name instead of the number the text came from.  I tested it on the emulator, Droid 3, and Bionic.  It was a small change.  Thought it would make a nice Christmas present.

Passed 20k downloads

The main A2DP Volume app passed 20k downloads today.  Now that 700k Android devices are activated a day it seems downloads are following.  The are 97 ratings too, getting close to 100.  The active installs are 3875.  Below is the language breakdown.

French now exceeds UK English

Check this out.  French now exceeds UK English and becomes the #2 language.  This shows to me that good language support is very important.  Not only does the app support French properly but there is also a French language description page on Android Market.  So far the Android Market description page is only supported in English and French.  I think if we had that page in German that we would get more German installs too since the app does have good German translations already.  Many thanks to the work of Uwe and Sebastien on the translations!

a2dp.Vol

1	English (United States)	54.3% (1,657)
2	French (France)	7.1% (217)
3	English (United Kingdom)	6.9% (210)
4	German (Germany)	4.5% (138)
5	Spanish (Spain)	2.6% (79)
6	Spanish (United States)	2.2% (66)
7	Chinese (Taiwan)	1.9% (57)
8	Russian (Russia)	1.5% (46)
9	English (Australia)	1.4% (44)
10	Dutch (Netherlands)	1.3% (41)

Another milestone

A2DP Volume exceeds 15,000 downloads and 3,000 active installs.  There are now 83 feedback posts too.  Android Market made some changes to the way they count active installs which caused a big dip in the reported active installs.  It did show over 4,000 before the change. 

French language now accounts for 7% of active installs and German 4.3%.

Just a short update on the download and install rates. It seems to be continuing rather strong. As of now there have been 12878 downloads and 3670 active installs. Just a couple months ago the active installs were about 1,000.

The language distribution has changed as well. French is now 5.3% of active installs and German is 4.5%.

New languages helping

2.3.8 has been out for a couple weeks now and the language distribution has changed. Now that we have French, and the app description is also supported in French, French has become the #2 language for the app. Above is the latest snapshot of active installs by language. Total installs is now over 11,000 and active installs over 3,100.

There have been complaints from users about the SMS reader not working. I saw this happen on a friends Droid X with a T605 car kit. It kept asking for a TTS engine to use. There is something wrong with his TTS engine setup. I am just using the Android TTS services. A2DP Volume does check for a valid installation and it tests to ensure it is initialized properly before reading SMS. In his case, it kept asking for a TTS engine to use, as he had 2 installed. Issue 72 on the issues list has this issue captured and I will work to resolve that.

2.3.8 Published to Android Market

Finally published this update to the market. There were 10 test versions between 2.2.4 and this version as we were cleaning up translations (many thanks to Uwe and Sebastien), the text message reader, and a few other reliability and performance improvements.

Go here to get it:

https://market.android.com/details?id=a2dp.Vol

I tested with Droid 2 and Droid 3 using a Motorfola T605 car kit and a Motorola HF850 car kit. All worked well. Music paused, SMS was read, then music resumed. I tested all 3 streams as well. Unfortunately this is one of the challenges with an app of this nature, it is hard to test all the phones, tablets, and Bluetooth receivers out there. As always, please post any enhancement requests or defect reports to the issue list here:
http://code.google.com/p/a2dpvolume/issues/list

Here is a capture of the statistics just after publishing 2.3.8.


lets see if this changes now that we added French and there is French description info in the Android Market.

Audio Manager issues

I have been struggling to get the text message (SMS) reader working well. It works fine when I send the Text-To-Speech (TTS) to the music stream and you are using the default music player. It will pause the music, play the TTS, and then resume the music. If you use most other players (like Winamp or Amazon) it does not work properly.

If you use the in-call stream, it seems to work great on the Droid phones. However, some devices using Android 2.2.0 will reboot when the TTS is done playing. They also won't play the TTS (it appears muted). Even on the Droid's something strange happens. It all seems fine until you disconnect from the device. Then your streams all go to the phone earpiece instead of the phones speaker. A quick reboot fixes it but that is very annoying.

I added another stream selection, the alarm stream, to 2.3.7. That one works quite strange. It will play through the phones speaker even when connected to a Bluetooth handsfree and A2DP device. OK, so maybe that is not so bad. However, it never pauses the music, it just permanently mutes the A2DP stream after playing the TTS.

I tried capturing AudioMode before, and then restoring after but it made no difference. I have tried reordering the calls, disabling each call one at a time, etc. I have scoured Stack Overflow and of course Google. Not sure I can totally fix this now. I have read the documentation and examples several times. It appears the audio focus has many strange bugs. Maybe it is all a timing issue? I just implemented the on focus change listener but I have not really put any code in it as I did not really see the need. Maybe I need to have this listener look for the state change before progressing to the next audio manager command.

One other strange thing I noticed is when using the in-call stream if I try to pause the music right after the TTS gets done it will keep restarting by itself. If I wait a few seconds its fine. This is part of what makes me think it could be a timing issue. Also, I used the alarm stream and it muted A2DP as explained above. Then I switch it to the music stream. After the next text was read, the A2DP stream worked fine again. So, when I make a audio focus call again, it seems to move the streams around fixing or breaking things

I am testing on both a Droid 2 and Droid 3. Both have Gingerbread.

Thoughts anyone?

French now supported

We just added real French translations to version 2.3.6. The app now supports German, French, and English.

Just passed 10,000 downloads!

The main A2DP Volume app just passed 10,000 downloads on Android Market. 

I just created a new version of A2DP Volume and I need help testing it. If you have an Android 2.2 or later device, please download and install A2DP Volume 2.3.4 currently available only here:

http://code.google.com/p/a2dpvolume/downloads/list

This is a test version but it is signed and will install on top of older versions fine. If you have an older version of A2DP Volume installed, backup your data first but selecting [Android menu button] (while in A2DP Volume main screen), [Manage Data], [Export database to SD card]. Sometimes Android Market will see this as a different version and revert you back to the latest on Android Market automatically, which will clear your database. If that happens, you can simply import your data back.

Please report any issue to the issue list: http://code.google.com/p/a2dpvolume/issues/list

I need to test the text message reading feature on various devices before releasing this to Android Market. You can see the changes summary here: http://code.google.com/p/a2dpvolume/wiki/Updates

A2DP Volume A2.1 version

I really want this old version to just go away. I have no desire to support 2 versions. I only created this to cover folks as they were struck on Android 2.1 and complained A2DP Volume was written for 2.2 and up. Below is the current distribution of the old Android 2.1 version of A2DP volume.

a2dp.Vol21

1	Android 2.2	43.4% (334)
2	Android 2.1	35.3% (272)
3	Android 2.3.3	20.1% (155)
4	Android 2.3	0.3% (2)

Only 35% of the users are on 2.1 still. I presume that most of these are just people who installed it before they got the 2.2 upgrade. I suppose it could be a bunch of new installs too. So, today I released a new version of the old app A2dp.Vol21. This time I marked the min and max API version as 7. This means it will only show up on the market for people with Android 2.1. This should eliminate installs on Android 2.2 and later. While I was at it, I removed all other language support since these old translations were done by Google Translate and were bad. So, at least if you are stuck with Android 2.1 you are no longer stuck with the bad translations.

Please, if you have Android 2.2 or higher do not install this old version (A2DP Volume A2.1 version). Instead, install the latest version from Android Market (Simply A2DP Volume).

Languages using A2DP Volume

As of right now, the only langauges supported in A2DP Volume are US English and German. I am hoping to get the French translations soon and there is a person who said they would do the Spanish translations. Those are the top languages used in the app today so that makes sense. If anyone would like a language added, just drop me a note or respond to this post. It is not difficult to add a language. I just send you a file called strings.xml. It is basically 2 columns of data: ine for the software variable key name and the other a text string. All you have to do is replace the English text strings with the proper string in the Language to translate into.

Installs rising much faster

As of this morning A2DP Volume has had 9010 installs, and 2279 active installs. That is double from just a month ago. The new features, the real German translations, and improved localizations are helping. German is now the #2 country of the active installs and we have not even completed translations of the descriptions in Android Market. Hopefully the French translations will make it into 2.2.5 which is already underway.

Not only have many new features been added, but many robustness improvements have been added as well. 2.1.0 was a bit buggy, as were some of the previous versions. 2.0.8 had many bugs as well. We now have some more eyes looking at this code, including professionals. That has resulted in better code.

2.0.16 now has real German translations. I have removed all machine translations after getting complaints from several users. The Google Translate tool in Motodev is really handy, except for the translated strings.

I have been cleaning up a bunch of inefficient code, smalls bugs, memory leaks, etc so the minor version number keeps incrementing. I am hoping to get that all stable soon and publish to a new Android Market soon. Then I will work to implement the SMS test-to-speech reader.

Welcome

This is the new blog for A2DP Volume app for Android. Visit the Google Code page for more details or to download the app. http://code.google.com/p/a2dpvolume/ . It is also available on the Android Market, Amazon App Store, and Motorola Shop4Apps.

A2DP Volume is an Android app to automatically adjust the media volume on Bluetooth A2DP connect and reset it on disconnect. This is done so the stereo streaming audio will work properly. Intended primarily for car Bluetooth systems. Also automatically captures location information so you can find where you left your car. The location can also be automatically captured when exiting Car Mode on your Android device. The location can be read by any app that understands GPS data such as Google Maps, GPS Status, web browsers, etc. Each paired Bluetooth device can be configured to your liking.

This app has experienced scope creep now and it does much more than originally intended. In addition to the media volume and location features, it now can automatically launch apps and shortcuts, connect to another A2DP Bluetooth device when the first device connects, and turn OFF WIFI when A2DP is active. A2DP Volume also works with car docks and home docks.

The main version of this application requires Android 2.2 or higher. There is another version for Android 2.1 which is the same except it does not support car mode or certain location features and configurations. The A2.1 version is no longer updated or supported. As soon as you get Android 2.2 or later, uninstall the A2.1 version and upgrade to the latest main app. See the wiki entry called upgrading.