v1.6.0 is out. After a long run of release candidates, the final build is published, and MusicBee Remote is listed on the Play Store again after a spell unlisted. For now v1.6.0 is on the open testing channel, with the staged production rollout planned for next week.

The long way here ​

This release closes out a modernization effort that's been going since around 2017. The point was never any single feature. It was getting the whole app onto a current Android stack so it could move forward again. That meant rewriting nearly every screen, replacing a pile of legacy libraries, and rebuilding the parts that had aged badly. v1.6.0 is where that work comes together.

If you've used MusicBee Remote before, it won't feel like the same app.

What's new in v1.6.0 ​

A new interface. The UI was rebuilt with Jetpack Compose and Material 3, replacing the old XML layouts. It's faster, the animations are smoother, and it follows your system dark or light theme. Tablets get a proper layout instead of a stretched phone screen.

Better library browsing. Sort genres, artists, albums, and tracks by name or artist. Switch to an album grid view when you'd rather browse visually. Drill down from genre to artist to album, and jump straight to an album or artist from the player or the queue. Playlists support folder navigation, and non-album tracks are grouped sensibly instead of scattered. There's a shuffle and play-all action for the library too.

Ratings and Last.fm. Half-star ratings are in, you can love or ban tracks on Last.fm from the player, and a new track details view shows the full metadata.

More reliable connections. This was the biggest pain point in the old app. v1.6.0 reconnects on its own when the link drops, shows a progress indicator while connecting, and stops cleanly when you disconnect on purpose. The offline state is clearer, and LAN discovery now finds every MusicBee host on the network in a single scan.

Widget, notifications, and sync. The home-screen widget was rebuilt to be more reliable, notifications behave properly, and library sync runs in the background with visible progress.

Under the hood. The app targets Android 16 (SDK 36), starts faster thanks to baseline profiles, and ships with much better test coverage. Smaller fixes landed on top, including marquee scrolling for long track titles, steadier now-playing queue paging and drag, and tighter memory use under heavy network load.

A number of long-standing requests got closed along the way, some open since 2017. The full v1.6.0 changelog lists every PR that went in. No plugin update is required; v1.6.0 works with the MusicBee plugin you already have.

How the rollout works ​

v1.6.0 is on the Play Store's open testing channel right now. The plan is to leave it there for a few days, and if nothing major surfaces, start the staged production rollout next week. It begins at around 10% of users and ramps up from there while I watch crash metrics. If a serious problem shows up mid-rollout, it pauses and a fix ships before it continues.

The original target was May. A bug in the now-playing queue surfaced late and needed more work than expected, which pushed it into June. The queue is one of the parts you touch most, so the extra time was worth it.

If you'd rather not wait on the staged rollout, you can install it today, and which build you pick is worth a thought. Install from the Play Store when it reaches you (or join the open testing channel now) if you want automatic updates; that build includes crash reporting through Crashlytics and Firebase. Grab the APK from GitHub Releases instead if you prefer privacy, since that build ships without Crashlytics or Firebase, though you'll need to update it by hand.

What's next ​

With the app modernized, attention shifts to the plugin and the protocol between them. A few of the most-requested features aren't possible on the current protocol, so the next stretch of work is exploratory.

  • A protocol update (v5). Several features are blocked on new data and capabilities from the plugin, including sorting by year, date added, and rating (#279), synchronized lyrics, playlist editing from the app, queue duration, and stop-after-current. The plan is to drop backwards support for everything before the v4 API and standardize on a clean v5 schema instead of bolting more onto the old one.
  • A Rust core for the plugin. I'm exploring moving the core of the plugin to Rust, with the existing C# side calling into it. The work so far focuses on exact parity with the legacy behaviour by replaying real sessions against the new core. If it pans out, it makes room for a standardized WebSocket and HTTP API with an embedded web app, so MusicBee Remote doesn't have to stay Android-only.

These are explorations, not commitments with dates attached, but that's the direction.

Thanks ​

To everyone who tested the release candidates, filed crashes, and waited, in some cases for years: thank you. That feedback is what got v1.6.0 finished. If you hit something, open an issue on GitHub or come say hi on Discord.