Friday, February 8, 2019

Recent updates to A2DP Volume

I have been busy this winter finally getting around to fixing a bunch of broken stuff on A2DP Volume and making changes required to comply with Play Store policy changes.  You can see the log of updates on Github.  Here are some highlights:


  • Removed a bunch of really old and unusable Pandora integration.
  • Fixed the custom intent maker to actually work
  • Fixed many issues around registering and unregistering broadcast receivers.  This was the root cause of the notification reader reading messages twice.  I also added a simple check to prevent the same message from being read twice.
  • Fixed the media playback when using voice call stream.  It works on Spotify now but not necessarily all players.  
  • Updated the minimum SDK (Android version) to 23 (or Android 6.0) and the target SDK to 28 (Android 9.0).  This is far more work than it sounds as this requires many things to be re-implemented as older methods are deprecated.  Play Store now requires the target SDK be 26 or higher.
  • Many additional robustness improvements.
  • Added many log file entries so people can use LogCat and see what is going on.
  • Removed the SMS reader to comply with new Play Store policy.  Now you have to use the notification reader to read SMS messages.  This also removed a bunch of permissions including not just SMS but also contacts access.  
  • Added a shortcut from the preferences menu to set up your notifications and removed the internal app preferences for notifications.  Basically Android now gives the user much more control over notifications so now you just use the configurations in Android for this.  I added a wiki about this here.
  • I removed the ability for A2DP Volume to set the media volume in Android 9 and up since Android 9 already has this built in to the OS.  However, I got bad reviews and complaints about removing it so I added it back but made the default to not set media volume.  It really is no longer needed and it may actually fight with the OS if you use it but I guess folks will need to learn that themselves.  It is interesting that it took until Android 9 to finally implement this, making the feature this app was named for obsolete. Now I really should change the name.
  • I made many improvements to the way the media volume before a device connects is captured.  This ensures that an adjusted media volume is not captured instead.  
  • I added an additional check to open the notification access permissions settings in Android so users can enable A2DP Volume notification access to make it work.  This was not very obvious and nobody seems to read the manuals so I hope this helps.  Many bad reviews claiming the reader did not work.



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