Android plan

Where the Android client stands against the desktop app, and what to change to make it feel like a modern streaming app rather than a settings form with a player attached. Written 2026-10-03 from a source review and four screenshots (Library, Title, Shares, Settings) taken on a phone running v0.5.0.

Android last caught up with the desktop on 2026-08-10 (4ef6225); the desktop gained about twenty features on 2026-10-02 that Android does not have.

Status (2026-10-03)

Done: section 0, every parity item, and every recommendation in section 2 — the Library, Title, Shares, Settings and Downloads redesigns, per-page app bars drawn edge to edge, search behind an icon, skeleton loading and generated placeholder art, Settings sub-pages and a language picker, a long-press Change match, Inter, light and tablet screenshots, the library and a title side by side from 840 dp, a poster-to-backdrop shared element transition, and predictive back on the title page.

Two departures from the text below. The tablet layout is a two-pane Row rather than ListDetailPaneScaffold, which would have added the adaptive-layout artifact for one split. Pull to refresh shows the indicator while a crawl runs, but not the crawl's progress.

Not yet verified on a device; the host gate (ktlint, unit and screenshot tests) passes, and Android lint runs in CI.

0. CI (done)

Every Android workflow run since August failed in :app:buildRustHost: pstr-core pulls keyring → dbus-secret-service → libdbus-sys, which needs libdbus-1-dev on the host. Because no run ever succeeded, no cache was ever saved, so each run started from nothing.

libdbus-1-dev added to both jobs' apt install.
Swatinem/rust-cache shares one key between the two jobs and saves on failure.
android/app/build/generated/mpv is cached on the hash of scripts/build-libmpv-android.sh; the script writes a STAMP (revision plus its own hash) last and skips the whole libmpv build when the stamp matches.

Later runs also needed meson 1.12.1 from PyPI (noble's 1.3.2 is too old for the pinned fontconfig), libmpv built and cached in its own steps so a later failure keeps it, and lint's OldTargetApi made informational. A cached run restores libmpv in under a minute.

1. Desktop parity

Ordered by value on a phone.

Open share links from outside the app. The manifest has only the launcher intent. Add an ACTION_VIEW filter for drive.proton.me/urls/* and an ACTION_SEND (text/plain) filter; both open the add-share dialog with the link filled in. Desktop: 4a54af3, 53a1d0a.
Streaming cache budget. Android runs on the fixed 4 GiB default (DiskCacheConfig::DEFAULT_BUDGET_BYTES), large for a phone. Expose DiskCache::set_budget through pstr-android, add a 1–16 GiB choice with a usage readout under Storage. Desktop: a432a93.
Hardware-decoding switch. pstr_mpv.cpp hard-codes hwdec=auto-copy-safe; a device with green frames has no way out. A Settings toggle, applied from the next file.
Episode list in the player. A bottom sheet (portrait) or side panel (landscape) with the title's episodes, opened on the playing season and scrolled to the playing episode. Desktop: 7e734db.
Long-press menu on tiles. Play/resume, mark watched or unwatched, download, change match, remove from Continue watching, in a ModalBottomSheet. Desktop: c5808a5.
Undo on snackbars for marking a title and leaving Continue watching. AppUiState.message is a bare string today; it needs an action. Desktop: 79c3f68.
History tab. Needs a bridge call over the pstr-core::library query the desktop page uses. Desktop: e7eeaa5.
Buffered range on the seek bar from mpv's demuxer-cache-time.
Up-next card with the next episode's still and a countdown ring instead of "Up next in 7s" text.
Featured banner at the top of the library. Desktop: 7d03736.
Bundled Inter in ui/theme/Type.kt, so both clients read the same. Desktop: 558446b.

2. UI recommendations

Everywhere

Colours stay the theme's. The red is the Persona theme's accent and the card tint comes from the shared palette, so the redesign changes layout and button hierarchy, not colours.
One button hierarchy. At most one filled accent button per screen; secondary actions tonal or outlined; destructive actions behind a menu and a confirmation, never a filled red button in a list row.
Edge-to-edge, per-screen titles. The "proton-stream" app bar on every page wastes a band of height. Library uses a collapsing large title; Title pages draw the backdrop under the status bar; other tabs use their name.
Skeletons instead of spinners for library and title loading, and generated placeholder art (gradient from the accent plus the title's initials) instead of a black card with a play triangle (Akira).
Pull-to-refresh (PullToRefreshBox) replaces the top-bar refresh icon, with crawl progress shown in the indicator area.
Split ui/ProtonStreamApp.kt (1665 lines) into one file per screen before the work below; every item touches it.

Library

Poster grid (2:3, posterUrl) at three columns on a phone, title under the poster with no card body. The current 210 dp cropped backdrops fit two titles per screen.
Continue watching: 16:9 still with the progress bar laid over the bottom edge of the image and "S03E11 · 12 min left" under it.
Search becomes an icon in the app bar that expands into an M3 SearchBar, instead of a permanent field above everything.
Fix "1 episodes" (line ~507; the season header already pluralises).

Title page

Full-bleed backdrop with a gradient scrim, poster, title and meta chips (year, score, genres) over it, collapsing as the page scrolls.
Synopsis clamped to three lines with "More".
One full-width primary button, "Resume S03E11" or "Play S01E01", then a row of icon actions: download, mark watched, and a ⋮ menu holding Start over, Change match and More on AniList. Today five buttons of three styles wrap over three lines.
Drop the "Preferred tracks" form and its Save button from this page. The player already remembers tracks by name per title (d3c5f07); expose any override from the player's track chooser.
Season picker as a dropdown chip or tabs, not stacked accordions; a 40 episode title is one long scroll today.
Episode rows: 16:9 still with progress overlay, "1 · Mother and Children" (provider name, else "Episode 1") rather than the raw file name [Judas] Oshi no Ko - S01E01.mkv, runtime or air date as supporting text, watched and download state as small trailing icons. The red S01E01 label above each row goes.

ListItem rows: name, "12 titles · crawled 2 h ago" or the failure, and a ⋮ menu with Refresh, Re-enter link and Remove (confirmed). The current row wraps "Custom password stored securely" over three lines beside three differently styled actions.
"Add share" as an extended FAB, which is also where the share-link intent from parity item 1 lands.

Settings

Grouped ListItem rows (headline, one line of supporting text, trailing switch), with the long explanations moved into the supporting line or an info dialog. Today each toggle carries a paragraph.
Split into sub-pages once storage and decoding settings land: Playback, Downloads & storage, Appearance, Metadata, About.
Language fields become a picker dialog over a language list, not free text.
Storage shows a usage bar (cache, offline episodes) above the budget choice.

Robustness

Screenshot tests (Roborazzi, JVM, no device) for each screen in light and dark, phone and tablet, at font scale 1.0 and 1.5 — the redesign changes every screen, and docs/TESTING.md has no visual layer today.
48 dp minimum touch targets and content descriptions on the new icon-only actions.
Tablet: ListDetailPaneScaffold for library + title, since NavigationSuiteScaffold already switches to a rail there.
Shared-element transition from a poster to its title page, and predictive back.

Suggested order

CI green (section 0).
Split ProtonStreamApp.kt; add screenshot tests for the current screens.
Parity 1–3 (small, phone-specific fixes).
Button hierarchy and Inter — every later screen inherits them.
Title page, then Library, then Shares and Settings.
Parity 4–10.

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