This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/selfhosted by /u/anultravioletaurora on 2025-02-27 12:53:17+00:00.
Hey all! 👋 Violet again with some updates to Jellify! 🪼
Like last time - this is gonna a wall of text, TL;DR at the bottom 😇
ICYMI - I’m building a music app for Jellyfin! We had some great conversation in the original post, which you can find here:
To Start Off:
WOWOWOWOWOW 🤯 I CANNOT thank you all enough for the kind words and support 🙏 My last post did way better than I thought (I even ended up on the Selfhosted Newsletter 🥹) and a lot of good discussion was had! I’m beyond grateful to be a part of such a cool community, and I’m incredibly thankful for all y’all’s help in shaping Jellify 💜 I did set up a sponsorship thingy on GitHub for those that would like to do so; you will forever have my gratitude. Under no circumstances, however, will features be ever paywalled. Instead, I’d like to see about taking feature requests, putting names in the app, mailing stickers, etc.
Since my first post, Ive gotten far more serious about Jellify, and I’ve been hard at work on development. I’ve spent the last three weeks working on a few areas I’d LOVE to outline and grab y’all’s thoughts on! 💜
Performance Gains (Memory Usage, Loading Time)
I spent the first few weeks since my post looking at performance; trying to make Jellify better, faster, stronger, without working harder 💪 A lot of time has gone into making sure that memory stays in check even after MANY hours of playback and usage. This is really important as my dad is a road warrior, so Jellify needs to keep up on long listening sessions. I also made some tweaks to boost performance, making the Home Screen and the rest of the UI faster at boot. I’ve realized since my last post that I have a lot of polish to apply before I feel comfortable releasing Jellify into the wild, and this was a huge step in that direction
“Library” Tab Revamp
I’ve updated the repo screenshots to show this off. This tab used to be “Favorites” but also included a user’s personal playlists, so I felt this name might be better? My intent with this tab is to emulate how streaming services handle a user’s “library”, that being the tracks, albums, artists they’ve favorited and the playlists they’ve created, not necessarily everything available.
Do y’all like “Library” and the icon for it given the use of it? Or should I go back to “Favorites” with the knowledge that a user’s created and favorite playlists will be in there?
“Discover” Tab plans
I’ve started to shape this area of the app, adding a row for Recently Added Tracks but in the next coming month this is going to see a lot more. My plans for this is to include a row where users can jump into Instant Mixes based on their frequently played artists. This is also where I plan on including rows for “On this Day”, where you can see albums from given date years prior, and “I’m Feeling Lucky”, where you’ll get random albums, and artists. Thanks to everyone who gave ideas for this section! Honestly the area of the app I’m the most excited about 🤩
Thanks to a few selfhosted members, I’ve worked out the kinks for distributing TestFlight builds. Right now I’m keeping Jellify under a private TestFlight to apply more polish before releasing Jellify into the wild, but a Public TestFlight will be made available March 28th (thank you Sean for helping me work out kinks!)
Android builds are SO CLOSE! Thanks to the sponsors I’ve received, I’ve been able to get time with Marc Rousavy, who maintains some of the open source software used by Jellify. He’s been able to get my Android bugs fixed, and I’m I now working through getting builds running. I’m hoping I’ll have Android builds ready to rock by March 28th, the same day as the public TestFlight. This gives me time to do a private test phase with some Android friends to clear up any showstopping bugs. I’ll be making another post that day with instructions on how to install!
I’d like to incorporate anonymous, opt-in logging before releasing the betas on March 28th. My plans would be to capture the Jellyfin server version, the device model, and the OS version, that’s it! It’s opt in, but being able to collect crash data with that information will be super helpful in catching bugs and fixing issues. I would use GlitchTip, an open source alternative to Sentry. How do you all feel about this?
One more thing
I’ve been learning more about CarPlay and its APIs, and I’ve been able to get some of the phone UI built into the car UI. CarPlay has a lot of restraints as far as how many items you can show in a list, and how deep you can navigate. Given those restraints, I’ve been organizing the Car experience to feel familiar to the phone, that being you’ll have the same set of tabs, offering similar functionality (albeit the car not getting as granular into details, functionality, etc)
I’d love to know from CarPlay users, what features are you looking for in a CarPlay music experience, and there any must have features from other CarPlay music apps you’d want?
TL;DR:
Thank you all for the support! I’ve doubled down on Jellify, and I’m happy to say that it’s gotten some much needed optimizations, UX improvements, and feature enhancements. Some areas that have been murky or blocked for me (CarPlay UI design, Android support), are becoming clear and I have paths forward on them 🎉 Android builds and Public TestFlight will start March 28th, and you can sponsor the project on GitHub 💜
