Discussion - Githubissues

sungshon commented 3 years ago

Made this issue for an open discussion about the Android version..

Just wanted to share my own experience related to it.

youtube-dl, phantom-js, forked-systray won't work on android, so the addons using youtube-dl and phantom-js won't work either.. youtube-dl might be possible to get working on android though (see https://github.com/yausername/youtubedl-android ), but i haven't seen any successful build for phantom-js on android, and there are no good headless browsers for android either (although web view could be theoretically used for this purpose).. imo the addons that use these should be disregarded for now, the good thing is that PMS supports custom addon lists, so a separated addon list could be published to github to be used only for the Android version (that excludes the non-working addons)
app persistence is an issue here, and pretty much the biggest issue that got me to stop working on an android version, as I can't guarantee it stays running in the background. I had some luck with using .startForegroundService() (i think) to keep the app always active on a Nexus 6P

Other then that.. there haven't been any other big blockers (that i can remember) to get this running on Android..

sungshon commented 3 years ago

Oh, right, I counted how many addons use phantom-js and youtube-dl in this comment: https://github.com/sungshon/PimpMyStremio/issues/51#issuecomment-574716351

sleeyax commented 3 years ago

I've read your notes about the topic at the PimpMyStremio repo.

I think we should either drop support for addons that use unsupported dependencies or work around it using something remotely, like you mentioned here: https://github.com/sungshon/PimpMyStremio/issues/51#issuecomment-587516646
Some devices have settings to disable aggressive battery saving for specific apps, or there are other tricks like this that could work:

Disabling battery optimization didn't work for me so what i did was i installed a modded premium version of app cloner. Enabled the "persistent app" option so it doesn't get killed no matter how aggressive your android device might be and then clone stremio!

If none of these work, I don't think we can do much about the app persistence issue.

sleeyax commented 3 years ago

Btw, this pms-android project was made in a day (and +1 day to fix some bugs) as a fast POC, because people were asking for it. android-js has worked out nicely so far, but I feel a lack of control so I'm probably gonna try out nodejs-mobile soon.

sungshon commented 3 years ago

pms-android project was made in a day

My android attempt didn't take too long to get working either (granted, more then one day), it's the research that took the longest. And I'm still undecided in many aspects of it..

I think we should either drop support for addons that use unsupported dependencies

I think they should be dropped too, although it would of been nice to find a suitable workaround.. But getting fixated on this like I did will only hinder development, so getting it working without those addons is the logical choice.

Some devices have settings to disable aggressive battery saving for specific apps, or there are other tricks like this that could work

I'm not entirely sure how "app cloner" does it, I have to wonder if what it's doing to the apps can't be done in the app itself also. Otherwise patching all the releases with app cloner manually might get annoying at some point.

sungshon commented 3 years ago

I know it's a bit too late for this idea, but if i would make PMS addons use a package.json for setting module depencies, then I could:

mention the npm modules that are not white listed yet to developers (so they can open a PR to add it, and even link to a guide about how to add them for development purposes only)
filter out all the addons that use youtube-dl and phantomjs easily for this project

There are other benefits to this also.. I could only allow access to those specific modules (from package.json) to each addon.

sungshon commented 3 years ago

This is also really scalable, we could make module support templates, one being no-binary which might even run in node.js playgrounds. And also platform specific modules, PMS supports internal modules, this means we can even add internal functionality as modules for addons. youtube-dl-android could be a platform specific module for example, that has a completely different API then youtube-dl for Desktop, and addon devs could write different logic depending on which is available for them..

sleeyax / pms-android

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