Who would have ever thought… Transdroid is 10 years old!
On 25 february 2009, the very first apk went public, asking people for feedback. A release in the – then called – Android Market followed soon. It really was just build for myself, but with positive feedback the app and user base started growing…
It all started very humle. Android 1.0 was just launched, and the T-Mobile G1 was the only phone available. Interface design was skeumorphic or non-existing, and 3G only barely rolled out in cities.
Over time, the app did get bigger. Many new torrent clients got supported, multiple configurations, home screen widget, SSL connections, ‘high-res’ icons, RSS feeds, in-app search… When the time for a 1.0 came the app was much used and had over 250.000 downloads. Quite an achievement at that time.
It wasn’t until 2011 that I finally marked a version 1.0, indeed being pretty much feature-complete and stable. And then it got removed from the Play Store… a big blow at first. We didn’t do anything wrong, and certainly other apps were doing the same thing? But alas, the app stayed available and forever since almost all users get the app from my site or F-Droid.
Development never stopped, for sure. Phones without a physical menu button arrived – crazy! – so a fancy action bar came along with some colour. In 2012 the app got a tablet interface – all the hype back then.
It wasn’t until Transdroid 2, with a major UI rewrie, that a Holo theme followed, now coming in white as default, with black being an option. This eventually morphed into the Material theme that Transdroid still uses today.
So what’s in the future? Yes, the project is in maintenance mode. I don’t really have the drive and time right now to do major work, and apart from the random fix for new Android versions or update to the Search library, not much is going on. Perhaps one day I find the enthousiasm to properly rework the app. Perhaps ourside contributors can revive the spirit.
But whatever happens, I don’t see myself dropping the hundreds of thousands users. In fact, the app has more users than ever, I belief, and I care for them as much as 10 years ago. Fixes may be slow, but they will come. Perhaps even a small feature here and there – no promises. Thank you very much, to all of you, who used the app, spread the word, filed feature requests and bugs, even contributed code and translations.
Thank you all!
Eric
支持比特彗星（bitcomet）了嘛？
当然啦
Awesome!!! I follow also the GitHub and remember using Transdroid in the past … but not 10 years.
What an achievement Eric! 10 years is longer than most people’s marriage! I don’t think playstore is that important anymore as long as development mode is available 👍.
I’m sure you find no shortage of positive returns out of this adventure (like better job prospects) and I love your work.
Thanks mate!
Thanks for the kind words! Oh yes it change my career. 🙂
Just wanted to leave a comment to say my sincere thanks for all your hard work on Transdroid over the years. I use it every day, and it’s one of the rare examples of a mobile app offering a superior experience to the full blown desktop program in my opinion. Cheers, and here’s to another decade!
Thanks for the kind words!
Hello
Is there an issue with RSS? My tracker complains that RSS is pulled to often. I configured 4hrs, but on transdroid start it seems it is pulling RSS every time it is started.
You’ve made it a lot longer than most Google projects with full development teams do lol. Congrats and thanks for this app!
Just want to express my gratitude for this awesome project. Thanks Eric!
We definitely appreciate all you’ve done! Managing torrents would be a nightmare without this app.
I use Android subs version 2 and today was the first time I stepped over Transdroid. I was overwhelmed how many servers this app supports, how many features it has and how comfortable it is. Great work, really appreciate it! And even this year you give maintenance updates. Thanks!
Thank you for this app, it makes life so much easier. Best Regards