New FrostWire 0.6.0 for Android with considerable performance upgrades.

What’s new?
> Uses way less memory per connection.
> It’s able to support more connections.
> It browses and downloads faster
> See what’s being uploaded
> FrostWire for Android just turned 1 year old (~950,000 total installs as of this post)

Geek Speak

Basically we rewrote the entire networking core using a nonblocking io framework called Netty.

In the past FrostWire did a lot over UDP to avoid creating threads, then little by little we started migrating some of the messages over to TCP and things started working better, however we had to keep the number of peers you connected to a bare minimum since each connection required us to create a new thread. In theory the linux kernel used by most android should be able to handle lots of threads without much cost but in reality this is not so pretty.

With Netty we’ve gotten rid of a lot of threads and we’re able to use the network interface very efficiently to deliver and receive messages in just a few threads. This results in a lot more free memory and the new version of FrostWire (if connected to less than 20 peers) should feel a lot snappier, browsing (as more people upgrade) should work better, and the same with downloads and search.

On the UI side, we fixed a lot of crashes you guys reported (thanks) and now if you Touch the green Upward arrow when someone is uploading files from your Android, you will be able to see what files are being uploaded, at what speed and what the progress is. We didn’t add a “cancel” because we figured the new sharing policies are so strict now, that there should be no reason why you’d be sharing something you didn’t want to share in the first place, and if you did, you can always disconnect or exit the application and the transfer will be killed.

More coming

A hell of a lot more coming, with this release we’re now 1 year and 1 month old. We hope to regain the lost speed/time spent on the FrostWire 5 for desktop release. Expect a lot of changes during the next months in the UI, we’re thinking of new ways (probably UI rewrite) to make sharing both easy and safe. The last updates were meant to keep your files safe so that nothing would be shared unintentionally, however we know the UI is probably a bit hard to grasp for regular users but this will change soon.

We do read all the feedback you leave in the android market, wish we could leave responses, but just know we care a lot about this project and we are working hard to make it better with each release.

If you like this release don’t forget to rate us in the android market, we keep our fingers crossed that you’ll feel the difference.

Full Changelog

FrostWire 0.6.0:
– Core-Upgrade: Inspired by Twitter’s Engineering blog http://goo.gl/bg5jk the protocol stack
was rewritten using NIO/Netty. Reducing the numbers of threads, memory and battery consumption
considerably. The Application should now be able to browse more peers and feel a lot snappier.
– UX-upgrade: See what files are being uploaded.
– UX-upgrade: The multiple selection checkboxes are now available for unshared files.
– UX-upgrade: Long pressing on an unshared file and sharing it will now ask
to enable sharing for the file type if it was disabled, just like on the padlock icon.
The current file type being browsed will also be reloaded to show the user this file type
is now available for sharing.
– Core-fix: Makes sure FrostWire won’t go beyond the max number of peers.
– Bug-fix: Crash when trying to check all files when there are no files.