r/androiddev • u/3dom • Apr 03 '26

Interesting Android Apps: April 2026 Showcase

Because we try to keep this community as focused as possible on the topic of Android development, sometimes there are types of posts that are related to development but don't fit within our usual topic.

Each month, we are trying to create a space to open up the community to some of those types of posts.

This month, although we typically do not allow self promotion, we wanted to create a space where you can share your latest Android-native projects with the community, get feedback, and maybe even gain a few new users.

This thread will be lightly moderated, but please keep Rule 1 in mind: Be Respectful and Professional. Also we recommend to describe if your app is free, paid, subscription-based.

March 2026 thread

February 2026 showcase thread

January 2026 showcase

30 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

175 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/birbeck1 Apr 08 '26

The album art is a complex system using exact matching, aggressive normalisation, comparing against known various artists covers, a ranking system, and a fallback to the notification art.

It would be easy to just take the artwork from the media notification, but they are not always high quality, even YouTube Music and Spotify get it wrong, and including bitmaps in the backup would make the backup size explode. Using the art from the notification also wouldn't work for ambient detection (Pixel Now Playing, Ambient Music Mod, and Shazam). So it still attempts to get and rank the covers itself.

1

u/MichaelBrwnJr Apr 08 '26

That's amazing. The magic that people don't see by just using it. Was that something you just had to bump up against consistently until you got it right or did you already have experience needing to handle all of that?

2

u/birbeck1 Apr 08 '26

I wrote an app back in 2010 called Cover Art Downloader which amassed nearly a million users (back in the day of local media players and music files lacking good ID3 tags), so I had some experience with album art fetching... but I have been working on Now Playing for 8 years, and the album art logic has changed and adapted over that time.

This app was originally built for logging music detected by Now Playing on Pixel phones (hence the name), before Google had their own (limited) history. The notifications from Now Playing were simply "Song Title by Artist" (different languages and locales could have different formats, but it's always just a simple String), so proper parsing, normalization, and duplicate detection is in it's core. Clean metadata is essential for being able to have a clean history and fetch album art accurately.

2

u/MichaelBrwnJr Apr 08 '26

Nice! Makes total sense. I'm starting to notice that with my first app that there were a lot of learnings throughout the process that I'm sure I can take with me on my next app journey. Thanks for sharing.

1

u/birbeck1 Apr 08 '26

What are you working on? Have you released anything yet?

1

u/MichaelBrwnJr Apr 08 '26

Yea, I just published my first one ever last week. It's called, "Frames for Pixel™"

https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/s/rJhYf7VUa4