Hosting the app

Hello! I am new to AntennaPod and I would like to contribute to the maintenance of the open-source project. I wanted to know more about hosting the app and if the app can sometimes be unavailable due to maintenance. Thank you :slight_smile:

Hi @noabi, welcome to the AntennaPod community, and thank you for wanting to help out :slight_smile:

What do you mean with ‘hosting the app’? AntennaPod is an Android application and doesn’t really need hosting - only our website and other webservices are ‘hosted’.

Best regards

Hi @keunes, I mean the webservices. I wanted to know if they could be a reason why the app might be down for maintenance.
Thank you

Hi @noabi
Well, the AntennaPod is fully local - it does not rely on any web services that we host. So AntennaPod cannot be 'down for maintenance.

Are you perhaps referring to a synchronisation service? Or maybe some of your podcasts are not updating?

Yes I am referring to synchronization and the download services.

Thank you

Ok, downloading and synchronisation rely on different parties, and AntennaPod is not responsible for either:

  • Synchronisation: you probably use gpodder.net for this. Just like AntennaPod it is an open source project run by volunteers. But unfortunately they have many users and not enough active contributors. So the service often is unavailable.
  • Refreshing: AntennaPod uses a decentralised model, meaning that it gets information about new episodes directly from the podcast hosts.
  • Downloading: Just like most other apps AntennaPod downloads new episodes (media files) directly from the web server of the podcast host.

If there is an issue with refreshing podcasts or downloading episodes, there most likely is an issue with the connection or with the servers of the podcast host.

So if you want to contribute to improve synchronisation you would have to check in with the folks over at gpodder.net (though they have not been very responsive in their communication with us). How did you think of contributing?

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Thanks a lot! @keunes

I also thought of contributing to the tests as I ran the tests and saw some of them failing. I wanted to know how do you plan that with the contributors.

thank you :slight_smile:

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Which tests specifically failed, and in what way?

If you have time on your hands and a desire to make a contribution, I’d say you’ve made a fully correct observation in that the synchronization service needs work. While it’s not technically AntennaPod, I’d guess it’s related enough for some discussion here.

How about starting out by poking around with the current code base for the gpodder service and see what you can do with it?

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To be honest, I wouldn’t bother looking into gpodder. The project is pretty much dead. Unless you want to fully take over maintainership and make the project alive again, your time is probably wasted.

So if you don’t want to maintain/fork gpodder.net (which would be very nice for the AntennaPod project indeed), our project would greatly benefit also from
a) (general) investments in the Nextcloud Podcast app (it would be great for sync, but first needs to mature further) and
b) discussions with the author of Podfriend about synchronisation (I believe there is an API already and he has indicated to be open to the idea) and then of course implementation

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