Hello – I’ve been an AntennaPod user for several years now, and an Android Auto user for a bit over a month. Having been trying to get into AA and find the optimal way of starting things up before a drive, I’m come across a handful of small bugs and rough edges with AntennaPod’s interface in AA.
I’ve already raised some issues for the first few things I spotted, but I figured it’s probably worth a more general post rather than bombarding the issue tracker – there are some other smaller things and possible quality-of-life improvements which I’ll batch up here for some initial discussion.
I’ve been fiddling with the code to prototype a few of these already – for the points with commits, I’m happy to PR them up either separately or on one branch, pending any decisions on the open questions below (I’m aware unsolicited PRs are discouraged in favour of issue/forum discussion first 
). Discourse won’t let me link to them individually in one post as I’m new here, but the respective commits can be found here.
Additional small quirks
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The Current tab’s icon (
) doesn’t display because its colour is based on a theme variable which presumably isn’t available in AA’s style. This should just be a plain black icon for tabs, which is then inverted in AA (committed).The Episodes icon in the list area (as opposed to a tab) is dark grey on black though, so it looks like you’re expected to have dynamic icons somehow. That said, if Current is removed then there would always be room to show Episodes as a tab.
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I keep seeing an empty Current tab – there are two different detections for whether to show the tab vs. which feed item to display, and the latter lookup is probably more suitable to also use when deciding whether to show the tab or not (committed).
I’d also question whether this tab is needed at all, seeing as you get dedicated now playing controls in both playing and paused states – could this just be removed (committed)?
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Most episodes’ thumbnails appear to be missing? This seems to be most prevalant in the Episodes tab; in Downloads most of them do appear but some are still absent.
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Changes to episodes don’t appear in AA without leaving the app and re-entering. Notably this means newly-queued or -downloaded episodes don’t appear in the respective tabs.
Grid view for subscriptions
I’d find it a lot easier to scroll through the subscription list by thumbnail than by name. By making subscriptions a dedicated tab (instead of AA constructing the More menu), its layout can be set to a grid, similar to the main Android app (committed):
Note that the A-Z button produces a list view after you pick a letter, so it’s technically possible to still get a list if you want it.
Episode duration in listings
Already covered in #7838 on GitHub so just referencing here for completeness: list views of episodes currently show the episode title and feed title, but it’d be useful to have the duration in there too. AA seemingly has a field for this so it’s just a case of coercing it to display the information we want.