Tag: science

New FrostWire for Android 3.2.1 build 777

~ gubatron ~ Leave a comment

Distributed Search just got a lot better at finding things, and a lot more reliable at starting up.

What’s new

⬇️ frostwire-release-3.2.1-build-777.apk

Browse what other people share. Long-press a Distributed Search result and choose Browse Shared Torrents to see everything that person is sharing, then download straight from them. The first-run wizard now explains that seeding a torrent makes it discoverable. Browsing is on by default for torrents you are actively seeding (never your download history); you can turn it off in the wizard or in Settings > Distributed Search.

Smarter, faster search. Peers now tell the network what kind of content they hold, so your search goes to the people most likely to have it instead of random ones. Rare files turn up more reliably, even from phones and computers that are not acting as relays. Unreachable peers are forgotten instead of being retried forever, and Distributed Search is ready sooner after you open the app.

Clearer IceBridge status. Settings > Distributed Search now tells you what is actually happening: which startup step it is on, what went wrong if it failed, and a live countdown before the next automatic retry. It never gets stuck on “Starting…” without a reason.

Fixes you may notice

  • Distributed Search starts on release builds. A code-shrinking bug could stop the IceBridge networking layer from starting at all on installed apps. That is fixed, and the build now checks for it.
  • Downloads from the Peer catalog use the exact peer you picked, and failed or rejected starts (including VPN restrictions) are shown instead of silently disappearing.
  • Several phones on the same Wi-Fi no longer fight over one network port.
  • Transfers update right away when a torrent moves from Checking to Seeding, and when you come back from the details screen.
  • Only real audio files open in the music player; videos open with your system chooser.
  • Search results with accented or non-Latin names no longer go missing or appear twice.
  • The background service stops cleanly instead of crashing, and VPN or Wi-Fi-only rules no longer override a torrent you paused yourself.

Powered by jlibtorrent 2.0.12.9.

Full changelog

  • new:You can now browse the torrents a peer shares — long-press a Distributed search result whose holder allows crawling (“Browse Shared Torrents”) to list everything that peer is sharing and download any of it straight from that peer
  • new:Distributed search routes to the peers that actually hold the content — nodes announce a compact keyword fingerprint and requests are forwarded to likely holders with a small bounded fan-out instead of random peers, so rare results are found reliably and faster
  • fix:Distributed search now finds torrents shared by peers that do not act as relays (leaf nodes) — forwarders were dropping their published keyword fingerprint, so those torrents only showed up by luck; the fingerprint is now honored when routing
  • fix:Release builds retain Netty’s dynamically accessed Android memory-fence fallback, preventing IceBridge startup from failing after code shrinking; release DEX verification gates packaging
  • fix:IceBridge settings show actual startup phases, timeout and failure status, and a live retry countdown; startup attempts are coalesced, late attempts cannot publish, and failed starts retry at most three times without bypassing cleanup or network policy
  • new:Seeding is publishing — the first-run wizard explains that seeding a torrent makes it discoverable on the BitTorrent network, and lets you opt out (on by default) of having the torrents you are actively seeding browsable by the network’s crawlers
  • fix:The crawler sharing setting now gates both mesh browsing and DHT catalog publication; only active non-private seeds are browsable, and opting out withdraws the previous catalog without disabling ordinary distributed search
  • fix:Only torrents you are actively seeding are shared with catalog crawlers — downloaded history that is not seeding is no longer published
  • fix:Distributed search becomes available sooner after startup — peer discovery, signed DHT announcements, and mesh registration now begin immediately in parallel rather than blocking the search UI; resume recovery uses one timeout budget
  • fix:Distributed search and the relay stay responsive under heavy search traffic — packet processing is handed off the socket event loop, response delivery runs on a bounded lane, and concurrent torrent-metadata fetches are capped
  • new:Peers keep an up-to-date list of reachable IceBridge nodes and never query unreachable ones — nodes that stop answering (directly or through a relay) are removed from the local list and evicted instead of being retried forever
  • fix:IceBridge UDP ports now default to automatic selection so multiple devices behind one router do not all claim port 6889; existing default settings are upgraded once, custom ports remain supported, and announcements use the actual bound port
  • fix:Peer catalog downloads preserve the selected holder’s identity, show rejected starts and VPN restrictions, and keep failed metadata transfers visible as errors instead of silently removing them
  • new:IceBridge participates as a full node (BOTH) by default, with a separate relay-participation switch and a node setting that restarts the relay stack when changed
  • new:Search progress now shows IceBridge status — “Distributed Search · N peers contacted” with starting / not-running hints, translated to every supported language
  • fix:Warming the mesh on relay startup lets a fresh install find peers without waiting for the first discovery tick
  • fix:Shared hybrid torrent indexing consistently uses the metadata v1 hash and removes only proven truncated-v2 aliases after the canonical row is stored
  • fix:The local search index preserves FTS rowids across reindexing and repairs triggers, fixing missing or duplicated results with unicode names
  • fix:VPN and seeding preference toggles suspend torrents for policy without overwriting an explicit user pause, and the transfer list is no longer cleared on reset
  • fix:The engine’s foreground service stops cleanly when promotion fails instead of crashing with RemoteServiceException
  • fix:Network status changes are no longer rebroadcast, and notifications fire only for real Wi-Fi/mobile/VPN transport changes
  • fix:Transfers rows now react to libtorrent state-change alerts, so Checking-to-Seeding updates do not wait for the next periodic list refresh
  • fix:Returning from transfer details immediately refreshes the transfers list so the row reflects the latest Checking, Downloading, or Seeding state
  • fix:Only real audio files open in the music player; video containers (webm/mp4/mkv/…) open with the system chooser
  • fix:Distributed Search settings refresh automatically while the screen is visible
  • fix:Deselecting every web search engine leaves Distributed Search enabled and no longer re-enables Archive.org at startup
  • fix:Release shrinking ignores optional Netty codec, JFR, and LDAP classes that Android does not ship, so the release build can complete

FrostWire for Android 3.1.0 build 771: modern playback, safer downloads, and much stronger Android compatibility

~ gubatron ~ 4 Comments

FrostWire for Android 3.1.0 build 771 is a major stability and modernization release centered on one high-impact outcome: the app now behaves much more like a modern Android media and download app.

This build rebuilds the music player around Media3/ExoPlayer, restores reliable standard Android media notifications, hardens YouTube and Internet Archive downloads, migrates preferences to Jetpack DataStore, modernizes VPN/Wi-Fi protection logic, and removes a long list of UI-thread bottlenecks that could lead to freezes or ANRs.

By the numbers

FrostWire for Android 3.1.0 build 771 includes 120 documented Android release-note items:

  • 69 fixes
  • 13 improvements
  • 33 maintenance items
  • 5 new features

We were able to perform 120 updates using a ton of AI compute sponsored by your donations, thank you.

There is no separate crash: bucket in the 3.1.0 changelog, but many of the fixes are crash-class or ANR-class hardening, especially around Chaquopy/yt-dlp startup, music playback transitions, DataStore persistence, MediaStore access, and deprecated Android API migrations.

Highlights, from most important to least important

1. The music player was rebuilt around ExoPlayer and Media3

This is the biggest change in the release.

FrostWire’s Android player moved from the deprecated MediaPlayer and RemoteControlClient stack to ExoPlayer / Jetpack Media3 / MediaSessionService. That migration fixed long-standing race conditions and made the player work like a current Android media app.

The result:

  • a standard Android media notification instead of a fragile custom RemoteViews implementation
  • output device selection in the notification for Bluetooth/Cast-style routing
  • more reliable play/pause, shuffle, repeat, and metadata refresh behavior
  • much better behavior during cold start, background playback, next/previous, and auto-advance transitions

2. Android media notifications now survive real playback use

The media notification work was not just a visual refresh. It fixed a whole class of playback-control failures that made background listening unreliable.

This release fixes:

  • missing media notifications on Android 12+
  • notification disappearance during engine-service notification refreshes
  • notification loss during next/previous/auto-advance transitions
  • stale Not playing state during active playback
  • notification controls failing to keep metadata, cursor state, and queue state in sync
  • previous-track history breaking after several songs
  • playback being killed when backing out through FrostWire’s “go home” dialog

In practice, the player notification is now much closer to how people expect Spotify, YouTube Music, or Pocket Casts to behave.

3. Fresh downloads and direct-file playback now work much better

3.1.0 removes a major source of frustration around newly downloaded songs.

The app now handles audio files more intelligently before MediaStore has indexed them:

  • freshly downloaded audio can start immediately instead of waiting for slow MediaStore indexing
  • YouTube audio downloads now open in FrostWire instead of a third-party app
  • direct-file playback no longer depends on a valid MediaStore ID
  • freshly completed YouTube downloads from Transfers can replace the current song correctly
  • album art fallback works even when MediaStore IDs or album IDs are not ready yet

This means FrostWire now behaves correctly in the exact window where users most often try to play a file: right after the download completes.

4. YouTube download reliability was substantially hardened

The YouTube pipeline got a deep reliability pass.

Notable fixes include:

  • fixing the Chaquopy/yt-dlp startup crash path caused by Android-incompatible subprocess behavior
  • threading per-format http_headers through the full download pipeline so requests keep the headers YouTube expects
  • preventing malformed headers from dropping all subsequent headers
  • treating non-2xx responses as failures so FrostWire no longer leaves behind misleading 0-byte files
  • improving browser-like default headers in the OkHttp wrapper

This release also updates the Python/Chaquopy environment and the yt_dlp integration so Android playback and downloading are much less brittle.

5. Search and download sources are more dependable again

Several search and download integrations were repaired or improved:

  • SoundCloud search was restored by validating remote credentials before caching and falling back safely when necessary
  • SoundCloud result filtering was corrected to match real downloadable/streamable behavior
  • Internet Archive downloads from search results were restored, including nested archive paths for composite crawled results
  • YouTube playlist URL search was added, with playlist partial-result support in Telluride
  • FrostWire is now offered more reliably for .torrent files and magnet links from browsers and download managers

The common theme is less silent failure and better handoff from search results into actual playback or downloads.

6. Preferences and settings were modernized with Jetpack DataStore

This release migrates FrostWire away from SharedPreferences to Jetpack DataStore, with a central configuration repository and safer default handling.

Benefits include:

  • atomic preference writes
  • safer migration from older installs
  • less risk of preference corruption or type mismatch crashes
  • settings writes moved off the UI thread to reduce ANR risk
  • a single source of truth for defaults and volatile preference resets

This is one of the most important under-the-hood changes in 3.1.0, even though it is less visible than the player work.

7. UI freezes, disk I/O, and ContentResolver work were pushed off the main thread

A large part of 3.1.0 is Android hygiene work that directly affects responsiveness.

The release removes:

  • 38 ContentResolver.query() calls from the UI thread
  • 12 disk I/O operations from the UI thread
  • 9 unnecessary async roundtrips for simple in-memory reads

It also fixes multiple StrictMode violations across music, transfers, suggestions, settings, and file opening flows.

These are the kinds of changes that make the app feel less fragile even when they are not visible as a single headline feature.

8. VPN Guard and Wi-Fi Only protections were updated for modern Android APIs

Networking protections had been weakened by deprecated Android APIs.

3.1.0 fixes this by:

  • migrating network monitoring from deprecated broadcast-based connectivity APIs to NetworkCallback
  • restoring correct Wi-Fi Only behavior
  • restoring correct VPN Guard behavior
  • adding faster periodic protection-state monitoring
  • surfacing transfer-screen indicators when protections pause downloads

This is important correctness work for anyone relying on FrostWire to respect network constraints.

9. Transfers, My Music, and deletion flows were cleaned up

Several library and transfer-list correctness bugs were fixed:

  • transfer rows and transfer detail file lists now refresh against the correct live state
  • transfer audio play buttons now open the same player flow used by My Music
  • deleting songs no longer leaves ghost entries in Recent/Favorites
  • 0-byte broken downloads are now filtered out of Recent
  • track deletion avoids a lifecycle-related NullPointerException

This reduces a class of bugs where FrostWire appeared to “undo” the user’s action because the UI reloaded stale data too early.

10. New power-user and privacy features were added

The release also adds a few meaningful new capabilities:

  • I2P network integration for anonymous proxy support
  • I2P settings UI under Settings > Advanced
  • frostwire_launcher.py TUI to build, install, run, and inspect the app without Android Studio
  • live logcat viewing from the launcher

These are not the core reason 3.1.0 matters, but they make the build more capable for both advanced users and developers.

11. Android compatibility and dependency modernization continued

This build also includes a broad modernization sweep:

  • EngineIntentService moved away from deprecated JobIntentService
  • deprecated fragment/activity/notification APIs were migrated across the app
  • old custom media notification plumbing was removed in favor of Media3
  • Gradle/AGP/Python/build tooling and multiple Android dependencies were updated
  • search and media helper code was cleaned up and consolidated

That maintenance work matters because much of the 3.1.0 stability gain comes from removing old code paths that modern Android no longer treats kindly.

Types of work in 3.1.0

This release is not just “a player update.” It spans several categories:

  • Playback architecture modernization: MediaPlayer -> ExoPlayer/Media3, MediaSessionService, notification/output controls
  • Playback correctness fixes: queue sync, metadata refresh, previous/next behavior, cold-start playback, direct-file playback
  • Download hardening: yt-dlp/Chaquopy reliability, YouTube headers, 0-byte download prevention, archive.org result downloads
  • Search/source fixes: SoundCloud, Internet Archive, YouTube playlist URLs, intent filters for torrents/magnets
  • Settings/persistence modernization: SharedPreferences -> Jetpack DataStore, safer migrations, centralized defaults
  • Responsiveness and ANR prevention: main-thread query and disk-I/O removal, StrictMode cleanup, fewer async hops
  • Network protection correctness: Wi-Fi Only, VPN Guard, and modern connectivity monitoring
  • Developer and power-user tooling: I2P support, launcher TUI, live logcat

Why 3.1.0 matters

FrostWire for Android 3.1.0 build 771 matters because it fixes the seams between searching, downloading, and actually using media on a modern Android device.

Before this release, the most visible pain points were exactly where users notice breakage fastest: fresh downloads not opening correctly, notifications disappearing, playback controls getting stuck, settings writes freezing the UI, and modern Android API changes quietly breaking network protections or media behavior.

This build addresses those pain points directly and moves the app onto a much healthier foundation.