For now I mapped the ‘back’ button to open the sidebar, but I generally agree that the top left items (which btw are the most commonly used) are hard to reach.
Personally I think the trend is pretty clear - bottom navigation, potentially together with inline tabs. Looking at what we have in the app today, we can easily go down to 5 items but it would require a bit of UI redesign.
The bottom navigation buttons (and tabs) could be something like this:
- Playlist (Queue, History)
- Episodes (New, All, Favorite)
- Downloads (Running, Done, Log)
- Podcasts (Subscriptions, Discover)
- Profile (Settings, Statistics…)