On Android and iOS a swipe up or down on the left half of the picture sets the brightness and on the right half the volume; a sideways swipe seeks, showing where it will land and seeking only when the finger lifts. Swipes that start at the top or bottom edge are left to the system. Android turns the device's media volume; iOS lets no app do that, so there the swipe turns the player's own, as its slider does. Brightness set by a swipe is handed back when the player goes. Lock touch, in the player's menu, makes the picture ignore touches and the back gesture; a tap brings up Unlock for a few seconds. The sleep timer pauses after 30 or 60 minutes, or stops at the end of the episode playing instead of going on to the next, with no up-next card. On the desktop it is a panel like the others, behind a moon button that shows what is left; on Android and iOS it lives with the player host, so it keeps running with the screen off.
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iOS Development
The iOS client lives in ios/. It is a SwiftUI port of the Android client, screen
for screen and string for string, over the same Rust engine: crates/pstr-android
builds unchanged for aarch64-apple-ios as a static library, and UniFFI writes its
Swift bindings (module PstrBridge). It targets iOS 17 and newer on iPhone and
iPad. Keep reusable behaviour in the Rust crates; when Android changes, the iOS
file of the same name is the one to change with it.
| Android | iOS |
|---|---|
ui/AppViewModel.kt |
App/AppModel.swift |
ui/ProtonStreamApp.kt |
App/ProtonStreamApp.swift (RootView) |
native/NativeRuntime.kt, native/KeystoreSecretStore.kt |
App/NativeRuntime.swift, App/KeychainSecretStore.swift |
settings/SettingsStore.kt |
App/SettingsStore.swift (same keys, in UserDefaults) |
ui/*Screen.kt, ui/AccountUi.kt, ui/LanguagePicker.kt |
UI/*View.swift, UI/AccountUI.swift, UI/LanguagePicker.swift |
ui/RemoteArtwork.kt, ui/theme/* |
UI/RemoteArtwork.swift, UI/Theme/* |
download/* |
Download/* |
sync/NewEpisodesWorker.kt |
App/NewEpisodes.swift |
playback/PlayerScreen.kt, NativeMpvHost.kt, PlaybackService.kt, StreamSession.kt |
Player/PlayerView.swift, Player/PlayerHost.swift |
cpp/pstr_mpv.cpp |
Player/MpvPlayer.swift, Player/StreamProtocol.swift |
Playback is libmpv from MPVKit's GPL build,
rendering through MoltenVK into a CAMetalLayer, with the pstr:// stream protocol
reading decrypted blocks straight out of Rust as on Android.
Toolchain
macOS with Xcode 16 or newer, XcodeGen, and Rust 1.96 with the iOS targets:
brew install xcodegen
rustup target add aarch64-apple-ios aarch64-apple-ios-sim
The Xcode project and Info.plist are generated from ios/project.yml and are not
committed, nor are the bindings under ios/build/generated.
scripts/build-ios.sh test # simulator static library, bindings, unit tests
scripts/build-ios.sh all # device static library, bindings, dist/proton-stream-<version>-ios.ipa
all is rust, bindings and ipa in order; each can be run on its own. After
bindings and an xcodegen generate in ios/, the project opens in Xcode as usual,
where a run on a device needs a development team set on the target.
The .ipa is unsigned. SideStore and AltStore re-sign what they install with the
viewer's own Apple ID, which is also why the app has no extensions: a free Apple ID
gets few app IDs, and each extension costs one.
.github/workflows/ios.yml runs the tests and builds the .ipa on macos-15 for
every push to main and every pull request that touches the iOS sources or the Rust
crates under them. release.yml calls it too, and publishes the .ipa next to the
other artifacts.
scripts/render-ios-icon.sh renders ios/ProtonStream/Resources/AppIcon.svg, which
is Android's adaptive launcher icon with both layers on one canvas, into the asset
catalog.
Where iOS differs
Each of these is the platform's doing, not a choice to diverge.
- No Picture-in-Picture. libmpv draws into a Metal layer, and AVKit's
Picture-in-Picture only takes frames from
AVPlayerLayerorAVSampleBufferDisplayLayer. Background audio and the lock-screen transport work as on Android. - No share sheet. A share extension would cost a second app ID. A link reaches
the app through its URL scheme —
protonstream://add?url=<link>, or the link withhttpsswapped forprotonstream— or through Paste link in the Add share form, which finds a link anywhere in the clipboard's text. - Downloads run while the app does. A transfer is a Rust task, not a
URLSessiontask, so iOS has nothing to hand it to in the background. A download keeps going for the grace iOS gives a backgrounded app, then stops at a block boundary and is queued again; it resumes from its.partfile when the app next comes forward. "Download on Wi-Fi only" stops transfers on a cellular or otherwise expensive network rather than holding them back. - Sync runs when the app leaves the screen, inside the same grace, in
place of Android's
WatchSyncWorker, and every five minutes while it is open. - Background audio off pauses the episode when the app leaves the screen, where Android stops it.
- New-episode checks run when iOS chooses. Android's
NewEpisodesWorkercrawls every six hours on a network. iOS'sBGProcessingTaskis asked for no sooner than six hours, and the system decides when, mostly overnight on a charger. An app refresh would come more often but gets about thirty seconds, which a crawl of a large share does not fit in. - Presses are drawn by hand. Compose's ripple shows every press; SwiftUI's
.plainbutton style andonTapGestureshow none, which on a slow iPad reads as a tap that missed.PressableStyleandtapAndHold(UI/Theme/Accent.swift) stand in for the ripple, and a settings page goes back by an edge strip of its own, as a title page does, where Android has the system back. - No zoom into a title page. iOS 18's
.navigationTransition(.zoom)only runs inside aNavigationStack, and the title page is shown over the library by hand, so it keeps its slide in from the edge — Android's shared poster has no counterpart here. - The volume swipe turns the player's own volume, the one its slider sets. iOS lets no app set the device's media volume, which Android's swipe turns.
- Nothing is backed up, as on Android (
allowBackup="false"). The share secrets are this-device-only Keychain items, so a restored share list would arrive without them, and a restoredsync.jsonwould give two devices one sync identity.