Category: Updates

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

After a long time of some mere bugfixes, following by a long time of slow work on the promised refresh… Transdroid 2.5 is finally here!

The obvious change in the new Material design. Both light and dark themes are now styled in the design language that was introduced in Android Lollipop. While more is to come, the app should feel a little more modern in both graphical appeal and feel. As always, feel free Transdroid on GitHub!

Under the hood I have solved an array of bugs and incompatibilities. User of rTorrent, qBittorrent or Aria2? The new versions should be compatible with the latest and greatest of your favourite torrent client. Translations have been updated too. The Search Module was also improved. Several private and public trackers have been added for your direct search pleasure.

Finally, for now, I am updating the website and documentation. Some of it is from 2009 still. And I think you’d agree that SOME things have changed since then…

Just a quick update to let everyone know I am working still on the app. The last time has been busy and most development has been quite behind the scenes, as I am working on a small visual refresh of the app. Well small… it is getting a Material design look to match the Android Lollipop visuals and some parts needed a bit of tweaking to get right with those new and changed idioms.

A beta version should be available fairly soon, within a week or two. After that I will focus more on bugfixes again to update support for some clients (rTorrent, qBittorrent, tTorrent) and long standing annoyances. Hold on just a bit more!

UDATE: Transdroid does not support rTorrent with Digest authentication in this 2.1.0 release. I’ve fixed this for the next release, hopefully out at the end of this week!

Big update today to Transdroid and its little Play Store-cousin Transdrone. Most importantly it fixes MANY annoyances in both the UI and connectivity.

Using uTorrent, rTorrent, Transmission, Deluge, Bitflu, qBittorrent, Torrentflux-b4rt? Quite likely… and the new version should be quite a bit more stable for you. Moreover, Deluge has not support for labels (viewing and setting) and uTorrent and Deluge can force data recheck.

The UI has seen many little fixes like selection improvements, search input box that properly hides and much more. Remember the option to treat non-trasferring torrents as inactive in Transdroid 1? This is back: enable the ‘Treat dormant torrents as inactive’ option in System settings and every torrent that has no data transfer (0KB/s) going on will be listed as inactive. Especially useful if you have many seeding torrents that are not connected to any leecher. Finally, the widget now contains buttons for pausing or resuming all torrents on the server and can optionally show the server status statistics, that is, the number of and speed of your active uploads and download.

Perhaps your favorite feature is not here or you still have a poor connection? Add your issue to the GitHub issue tracker. Thanks!

Today marks a big day in the history of Transdroid. For the existing users, some of you who use Transdroid many, many years already, will receive an update notification for Transdroid 2, the first non-beta release. The whole UI has received an overhaul in true modern ‘Holo’ style fashion. Not only does this mean a more attractive and hopefully nicer to use app, but it also solved many interface bugs and makes the app ready for the future. This includes a modern widget, multi-select of torrents and files and much more. UPDATE: You can use the settings export and import feature to transfer your server, RSS and search settings.

But before we look into the future, a short trip to the past. Two years ago Transdroid was removed from the Play Store — then still called Android Market — and I am very happy to announce that today you can download Trandroid again directly from the official Android Play Store. Transdroid? Well, not exactly. To prevent potential problems I have decided that the Play Store version will not included torrent search and RSS feeds. To signify this clear difference I’ve given it a new name. Meet Transdroid’s little brother: Transdrone. Existing users who can live without integrated search, but more importantly new users who never heard of Transdroid, can now get a truly capable torrent manager right from the Play Store. And for those who love the search: the full Transdroid will always remain available right here. You’ll get update notifications right from the app.

Where from here? Well, development will not stop, only calm down a little. There are some bits and pieces that Transdroid 1 has and the new version doesn’t — most of them will be added in due course. New stuff will appear too. Got some idea for yourself? Share it on the new issue tracker.

Finally: if you upgrade you might encounter some small issues in certain special cases. Don’t hesitate to contact me via mail or on the forums. Found a real bug/crash? Use the error report feature (now found in the system settings) or leave a log on GitHub.

Thanks to some excellent contributions from the community (yay for open source!) a new version is available that brings some much requested additions. For rTorrent users Tom Briden made some additions such as deletion of data on removing a torrent, viewing labels (with ruTorrent’s plugin) and showing the real time a torrent was added. Also by him is a new filter feature for the main torrent lists. Finally, many thanks to all continues efforts form the translators. All languages have been updated.

Keep up the work everyone and the next version will be even better than this 1.1.10 release!

Check out the new release, version 1.1.7, which includes many bug fixes and small(er) improvements, plus all new BitComet support and improved labels. Thanks for contributions by Sergey (SeNS) and Alexey Rogovoy. The power of open-source, baby!

You should get a notification when starting Transdroid – or get it directly from the Google Code site.

Yup, Transdroid is still going strong… with a new release! Transdroid 1.1.3 can now be downloaded and brings you many, many bugfixes as well as a new active torrents view filter (both seeding and downloading), improve Transmission turtle mode, Shazam song share catching and (custom) coloured LED blinking on notifications!

Get it directly from transdroid.org/latest or view the full change log.

Freshly released at the Google Code site (or directly from transdroid.org/latest). It includes a bugfix for Transmission 2.42 or newer installs, but more notably an updated interface that scales to all phones and tablet screens. There are definitely some UX issues and possibility for improvement is big, but I didn’t want to wait longer with a new release.

Also just released is a small update to the Torrent Search library (directly available at transdroid.org/latest-search) to version 1.4. It has a small improvement to get The Pirate Bay’s .torrent links over the magnet links, while they’re still available.

Let me know about bugs you find in the issue tracker, so I can fix them for a next release. Transdroid development might be slow these days, but far from dead. 😉

I have just received an e-mail from Google that Transdroid, both the free and donate version, have been pulled form the Android Market. This is due to apparent violations in the content policies of publishing in the Android Market:

This is a notification that the application, Transdroid Torrent Manager with package ID org.transdroid has been removed from Android Market due to a violation of the Developer Content Policy. Please review the Content Policies and Business and Program Policies before you create or upload additional applications.

Note that Transdroid has been available for around 2 years on the Android Market. During this time there have been over 400.000 users who downloaded the app, who rated the app with a very high 4.6 stars average. Also, the Torrent Search module connecting to news feeds of sites that link to trackers by which media content can be obtained is still available.

I have requested an explanation on the specific reasons behind the removal of the app, to which I will post any follow-ups here. Until a hopefully soon reappearance it is possible to download Transdroid directly from this site or even get the full source code, hosted at Google Code, as you like, under a GPLv3 license.

Thanks to all Transdroid users for their support and enthusiasm. Let me be clear that I am happy to build a version for the Android Market that does satisfy their policies and can still help thousands of happy BitTorrent users around the world. If you feel the same way and can spare a donation, please consider a PayPal donation.

Update: Transdroid’s removal from the Market has been covered by sites such as Slashdot and TorrentFreak. Irony: Google hosts Transdroid’s code and Google awarded the app with a free phone.

Update: I have asked Google for reinstatement of the app on the Android Market. Torrent Search has been removed from the Market and a new version of Transdroid, stripped from the search and ezRSS features, has been mailed to them.

Dear Android Market Team,

Attached you will find an updated version of Transdroid. I kindly ask to consider reinstating Transdroid Torrent Manager on the Android Market by evaluating this new version. Since I have not received any details regarding the exact violations with the Android Market Content Policies, I have made the assumption that the violations applied to searching for media (as provides by internet sites and the now-removed Torrent Search application). This functionality has been removed.

Thank you for your consideration and hope to hear back regarding the reinstatement (or additional problems with the content policies) soon.

Regards,
Eric Kok
2312 development

The new version can be downloaded from the Google Code project website. Google is fully entitled to set rules for their own application market and I hope to yet again comply with these in the new stripped-down version.

Update: Feature on AndroidGuys, too. And Android Police. And Planet Android. And Digg. And Geek.com. And others…

Update: Google replied!

Thank you for your note. We apologize for our delayed response and appreciate the opportunity to review your appeal regarding the suspension of your application from Android Market. After an investigation, we affirm our initial decision and will not be reinstating your original application at this time.

If your developer account is still in good standing and you would like to upload a new, compliant version of this application to Android Market, please apply the following Content Policy guidelines to future releases:

[zip]

We are unable to reinstate applications that have been suspended due to policy violations. Please upload a new instance of the application which complies with Android Market Policies and Guidelines.

I am considering uploading a new Transdroid Lite version without torrent search and ezRSS feeds. The full version will, of course, remain available from this site.