Background
In the covid pandemic days, I had to spend my time stuck at home, like everyone else. I was new to Android app development at that time, so I was spending most of my time on GitHub looking at cool android apps others have made. This is when I came across a music app called Vi Music. It was a YouTube music client. At that time YouTube music was not a thing for me. specially because it wasn’t supported in Sri Lanka. So, I downloaded Vi Music hoping that it will get rid of the regional block. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. Anyway, to test this app, I used it with a VPN. The app had a lot of cool features, my favorite one being the song caching for offline playback.
Idea for a new app
One major problem I had with Vi Music was the region block. Using the music app with a VPN was a very inconvenient thing. So I wanted to add proxy support for Vi Music, which I did end up doing. However, after opening a pull request to merge this new feature, the creator of Vi Music told me that he’s no longer working on the app.
This is when I got an idea to make my own version of a music app. I wanted my app to use piped instead of youtube music.
This is not the first time I tried to make a music app. My previous attempt was to make a web based music app using invidious. I called it ‘Aural’. It was a pretty good music app, given that it’s made with vanilla Javascript and html.
Working on the new app
I had some previous experience working with piped. I had made a karaoke app called YouTune that used Piped API to search and play youtube videos.
Without wasting any more time, I created a new android app, and added a minimal search and list functionality and basically copied all the search related code from YouTune. Within one day I was able to create a working search experience for my music app.
Adding music playback
Adding music playback, including support for background playback and caching was a hard thing to do. Specially because I had zero experience with using MediaSessionService.
I tried using the code from Vi Music’s music service on my app, however they were using the old media2 version. Which I didn’t want to use. I wanted to use the new media3 on my app. So I had to resort to using the official media3 documentation to make my app’s music playback service.
After having a working implementation of the media session service, I started working on adding caching support and other features. It was pretty straightforward as I was able to use Vi Music’s code as a reference.
Releasing the app
The app was in a perfectly working, reliable condition when I decided to release this app as Mellow Music.
Joining the you-apps team
Few months after joining the you-apps team, I got this great idea to add MellowMusic to the you-apps collection of apps. We renamed the app to Vibe You and changed the icon to match other you apps.
As the first big change, Bnyro added the support for playback of local songs.
The app is more popular than ever before with hundreds of users and counting.