Author: Eric Kok

UPDATE: Alpha version 2 3 4 is released; see the highlight below for updates.

Since Transdroid was conceived over 4(!) years ago, Android has changed quite a bit. And so did Transdroid, as it went from a minimal list showing your Transmission torrents to a well known, feature rich and loved project. Even without the Play Store I am blessed with tens of thousands of active, supportive and plainly awesome users.

One of the things that didn’t quite stay up to date over time is the UI. Sure, it got updates like an action bar and a basic tablet layout, but it’s not exactly Holo and certainly needs a bit of a refresh. An excellent time to squash some UI-related bugs as well, such as 7″ tablet support, file priority color coding, multi-select in main screen and, much requested, properly handling http links for public and private trackers.

Transdroid 2 (not sure if I keep that name, will see) installed next to your old Transdroid. You can export your settings (just use the default settings.json storage location) in the old Transdroid and import them in Transdroid 2. Ready? Download the .apk directly at http://transdroid.org/beta

What works in this alpha release

• Fully responsive UI (from small phones to big tablets) with an updated Holo look. Light and dark theme available (check settings).
• Viewing your server’s torrents, getting details and file lists, starts/stopping/removing/etc. torrents and files. Sorting, filtering and textual search filtering in the main list.
• Multi-select actions on torrents, files and RSS items. Long-press a list to start a multiple selection.
• Adding of torrents via http(s), file and magnet links. Yes, both public and private trackers work again with http(s) links. (See below for extra info.)
• RSS feeds, including magnet links therein. (Cookie support coming soon.)

What does not yet work (but is coming)

• Search. Obviously a top feature and the next thing I will implement. Added in alpha 3!
• Setting of labels, updating trackers and setting max. download/upload speeds. All coming very soon. Added in alpha 3!
• Background service. No notifications yet on new RSS items or finished/new torrents. Coming soon. Added in alpha 3!
• The activity stack (basically, how the back button works) still needs to be tweaked. Improved in alpha 3; will see if it needs more work.
• No widgets yet. I will create a scrollable list home screen widget, to replace the aged static ones, in due time.
• Server settings now have the option to specify a local network, so no 2 separate configurations are needed. While this will solve a LONG standing feature request, it isn’t yet implemented in the alpha. It will in the beta.
• No new clients are supported. I hope to add Tixati and aria2 support, but it won’t be for a while. Contributions welcome though! Improvements for exisitng supported clients also have to wait a bit.

Important changes

• Transmission’s folder setting now overrides the /transmission part in the default /transmission/rpc folder. If you import your setting from the old Transdroid you might have to fix this accordingly. In other words, leaving the folder blank (using the default) is effectively the same as setting this manually to /transmission.
• Any http(s) link that ends with .torrent or is of the bittorrent mime type will again be picked up by Transdroid. If your (private) tracker requires a log in, then the links are still send to your server, but this won’t actually work. To circumvent this issue you may specify the cookies to use for the specific site. In that case the http(s) link won’t be send to your server, but is downloaded by Transdroid directly (using the cookies you specified) and then added to the server. To add a site, add a web search site in the settings. The domain of the search URL is used to match http(s) links. Enter cookeis in the key1=value1;key2=value2 format. This is similar to uTorrent’s RSS feed cookies support and you can read here how to get your cookie keys/values.

Reporting bugs and suggestions

• General discussion, issues, questions and suggestions: let’s keep it in the forum for now. I’ve made a dedicated announcement topic in the public forums.
• Experience a crash? Go to settings -> System -> Send error log to send me an email with details. Please describe what you were trying to do and what device you are using.
• The new version also lost some features which I feel were not very focussed and probably not used much. No auto refresh in main screen. No filtering over labels AND torrent status at the same time. Things may change if you are vocal enough, though.
• Transdroid will move to GitHub when the first non-alpha release is made. The issue tracker there is open yet please use the forum until the beta stage has been reached.

Have fun! Hope you enjoy the changes and it further boosts user adoption and appreciation. Let me know, here, on Twitter, on Google+ or in the support forum.

One of the longest standing feature requests in the issue tracker was to add support for Synology NAS‘ Download Station. With many thanks to Erwan Loisant I can now finally close this issue, because any Download Station 3.40 or newer can now be accessed by Transdroid. Obviously it doesn’t support the full feature set like rTorrent or Transmission, but the basic stuff works great. Many, many thanks to Erwan for the excellent code!

Quite some users has issues with links to torrents that Transdroid directly tried to add to the server (by sending the URL). This isn’t compatible with sites that use authentication, notably private trackers. I’ve decided to remove handling of http torrent links at the moment. This means an extra click (on the downloaded .torrent file) for users of public sites, but it’s the lesser of the two evils I suppose. By the way, if you get ‘Can’t read .torrent file’ messages, close Transdroid fully (with the back button or slide the running app thumbnail) and try again.

Also I would like to make public that I am working on a new, improved UI for Transdroid. So don’t expect much updates to the current version, instead I’ll let you now when there’s a new alpha release. I’ll post a screen shot soon.