Discuss playlist management

[defagos]

As an API consumer I would like to be able to play several items in a way that feels natural for my platform.

Acceptance criteria

• The various platform approaches have been discussed.
• Interaction with the media session / control center is discussed.
• Decisions have been taken regarding playlist management on each platform.

Tasks

• [x] Present how players approach this problem.
• [x] Decide how each platform should deal with playlists according to the current knowledge.

[defagos]

About playlist management and media session / control center

• The two topics address two different aspects:
  • Playlist management: Which items are played in sequence.
  • Media session: Which metadata is presented to the system for display in various system components.
• These features overlap, though:
  • When the item of a playlist changes the media session should be updated accordingly. This varies depending on the platform (e.g. metadata bound to items directly on iOS or API to provide the information manually to the media session for the web).
  • The media session might provide a way to update the playlist (e.g. next button in a mobile app which triggers playback of the next item).
• The web very likely has limitations in how the media session can interact with a playlist (e.g. triggering playback of a next item from a system UI like the control center on iOS or its Android counterpart).
• Unlike mobile platforms the web does not provide any native playlist support.

For all these reasons the best we can currently agree on is that each platform will do its best with the features available to it:

• Web: Custom playlist management integration with likely limitations in how playlists can be integrated with the media session.
• Android: Playlist management with navigation in both directions, media session integration, notifications.
• iOS / tvOS: Playlist management (with navigation in reverse direction requiring a custom implementation) and control center integration.

Some features might therefore not be available on all platforms in the same way (e.g. it might never be possible to play the next item in a playlist from the web player control center integration on iOS).