A New Universal Music Player

Posted by Nicole Borrelli, Android Developer, Programs Engineer

The Universal Android Music Player (or "UAMP") is a favorite on GitHub for music app developers with over 9,500 stars and 3,000 forks. Since UAMP was first released, Android development has changed significantly. ExoPlayer has improved, Architecture Components were introduced, and Kotlin became a first-class language for Android developers.

We decided that the best way to integrate the modern features for our beloved music app would be to re-write UAMP.

UAMP v2 was built from the ground up in Kotlin. The UI is built around ViewModels and LiveData. Playback, and particularly integration with MediaSessionCompat, was vastly simplified by utilizing the MediaSession extension of ExoPlayer.

We also added a bunch of new songs by The Kyoto Connection and Kai Engel.

There are some features from UAMP v1 that haven't been integrated into the new code yet. The missing features include Android TV with the Leanback library and remote playback via Google Cast. Even though these features aren't yet included in v2, we wanted to show you the new updates as soon as possible. The old code will continue to be available in the v1 branch on GitHub, so please take a look there to see how to use those features in a music app.

We would love your feedback on which features to add next. We are considering offline playback, improving the integration with Android Auto, and using the upcoming Navigation components of Jetpack for the UI. We'll be creating GitHub issues for features and improvements to help you let us know what is most important to you. Go vote on these features to let us know where we should focus our efforts.

We'd also like to invite you to open pull requests for bug fixes and features that are missing. See the contributions process for more information.

Grab the code from GitHub!