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Plan 016 B2, phase 1. Below 600px the grid drops its sidebar column, `bottom-nav` becomes the primary navigation, and the shell fits the viewport instead of scrolling sideways out of it. 600 rather than the sidebar's own 900, because 900 is a laptop and the answer there is a narrower sidebar, which is still a sidebar. Under 600 there is no room for one at all: 360px of viewport over a 200px nav is not a layout. **The tab bar is four destinations and a way to everything else.** Three to five is where touch targets stop being thumb-sized -- eleven over 360px is 32px each -- so the four are the ones plan 016's subset says a phone is for, and "More" opens the *existing* `app-sidebar` in a drawer rather than listing the destinations a second time. Two lists is two places to add the next view to. That reuse has a cost this found the hard way: a shared component brings its `data-testid`s with it, so rendering the drawer's sidebar unconditionally put a second `nav-home` (and ten siblings) in the DOM and **failed 30 existing specs** with "resolved to 2 elements" -- on a desktop viewport, where this element is `display: none` and the drawer can never open. It renders only while the drawer is open, and the component test asserts the absence, because the failure is invisible from inside the component and lands in files nobody touched. **What made the shell overflow was minimums, not padding.** Measured at 360px: the body was 652px wide, because a `min-width` in a flex row is a hard floor and a grid item's implicit minimum is its content. So `min-width: 0` on the boxes between the viewport and the content, and each component stands its own non-essential parts down in its *own* stylesheet -- search-bar's 200px floor, job-indicator's label (the visible one; the live region that announces it is untouched), audio-player's seek bar and volume. A media query inside a shadow root is answered by the viewport, so this is the component saying what it drops rather than the shell reaching in. Volume goes because the hardware keys own it on a phone, which is the same reason mediacontrols' Android handler implements no volume callback. Seeking goes because 4px is not a thumb target; it belongs to the full-screen now-playing view, which is the next phase. An existing spec therefore asserts the opposite of what it did: layout-overflow's 320px case used to require that the 464px behind `overflow: hidden` could be *scrolled to*, which was the remedy available while the shell had one layout. It reflows now -- 320px in a 320px viewport, exactly -- and reflow is what WCAG 1.4.10 asked for.
16 KiB
016 — What Android parity would actually take
Status: all of section A is done. A1–A3 landed with "let the app reach the user's music"; A4 (MediaSession, transport notification, audio focus) landed with "survive the screen locking". The direction taken is option 1, the full librarian:
MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGEplus an in-app folder browser, which keeps the path-keyed model intact. B1/B2 remain, both awaiting a decision rather than work. The sections below are kept as written, because they are the argument the decision rests on — see "What is left" at the end for the current state.
Plan 015 shipped a pipeline: the app cross-compiles, is signed and versioned, and publishes from CI. This is the assessment of what stands between that and an Android app worth installing.
The headline: parity is the wrong target, and choosing it would be the expensive mistake. Four of the blockers below are not porting work — they are the Android platform declining to support the model this app is built on. The decision to make first is in "The fork in the road" at the end; everything before it is evidence for that decision.
Severity is what the app does today, verified against the source and the generated manifest, not guessed.
A. It cannot work at all until these are fixed
A1. The app can read no music. (deepest)
build/android/app/src/main/AndroidManifest.xml requests INTERNET,
VIBRATE, ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE, USE_BIOMETRIC, POST_NOTIFICATIONS, the
two location permissions, CAMERA and the two FOREGROUND_SERVICE ones.
There is no storage or media permission of any kind. At
targetSdk 35 that means the app can see its own private directory and
nothing else.
Adding READ_MEDIA_AUDIO is necessary and not sufficient, because it
grants access through MediaStore, not through the filesystem. This
app's entire model is absolute paths: audio_files.file_path is the
primary key of ownership, AddLibrary(path) takes a directory, the
scanner walks it with os.ReadDir, and every one of
GetFilePathsByAlbums / ByGenres / ByRecordingMBIDs exists to hand
paths to the player. Scoped storage does not offer a stable directory
to walk.
The honest options are three, and they are not close in cost:
- MediaStore as the library source. Query the content resolver,
keep MediaStore IDs (or content URIs) beside or instead of paths, and
open audio through a
ContentResolverfile descriptor. This is the Android-native answer and it touches the schema, the scanner, the player's file opening and every path-keyed query. MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE. Keeps the path model intact and is effectively barred from Google Play except for genuine file managers. Viable only because we distribute through Obtainium — which is a real point in its favour here, and worth stating plainly rather than dismissing.- App-private storage only, i.e. the user copies music into the app's sandbox. Trivial to build, and nobody wants it.
A2. The first-run flow cannot complete.
first-run-wizard.ts calls DirectoryPicker(), which is
frontendutil.DirectoryPicker → app.Dialog.OpenFile(). CanChooseDirectories(true). Wails' own ANDROID.md lists open-directory
dialogs as "❌ Returns an error — SAF yields tree URIs, not filesystem
paths". So the one action the wizard exists to perform fails, and
<first-run-wizard> intercepts all pointer events until a library
exists — so the app is not merely empty, it is inert.
Whatever A1 resolves to decides this: a MediaStore library needs no picker at all, and a SAF tree needs the picker to return a URI the backend can use.
A3. MPRIS is compiled into the Android build.
mpris_linux.go is //go:build linux, and android implies
linux (documented, and the reason it is in the APK). It will look
for a session bus that does not exist. It needs //go:build linux && !android, and its Android counterpart is A4.
This one is cheap and should be done regardless — it is a two-character
build-tag change plus whatever mediacontrols.New returns instead.
A4. Playback will be killed the moment the screen locks.
The scaffold's WailsForegroundService is typed dataSync
(foregroundServiceType="dataSync", FOREGROUND_SERVICE_TYPE_DATA_SYNC),
and the manifest requests FOREGROUND_SERVICE_DATA_SYNC. A music player
needs mediaPlayback and FOREGROUND_SERVICE_MEDIA_PLAYBACK, plus a
MediaSession for lock-screen and notification transport controls,
plus audio focus — pause on a phone call, duck for a notification,
pause on headphone unplug. None of that exists today. oto will happily
keep writing to a stream nobody can hear.
This is the difference between "an app that plays audio" and "a music player", and it is Java-side work in the scaffold plus a Go-side bridge.
B. It works, but wrongly
B1. The x86_64 half of the APK cannot run on any Android.
Established in plan 015: modernc.org/libc's Xlstat64 issues a raw
lstat on linux/amd64, which Android's seccomp forbids, so the process
takes SIGSYS the first time it touches the database. arm64 is
structurally unaffected (no lstat syscall exists; it routes through
fstatat).
So ~31 MB of the artifact is dead weight on every Android device,
including x86 Chromebooks. Options: drop x86_64 from abiFilters
(smaller APK, no emulator target — which does not work anyway), or
carry it against a future modernc fix. Dropping it is the honest
default; it is also the only item in this plan that is a five-minute
change.
B2. The UI is a desktop shell.
MinWidth/MinHeight are 800×600 and were measured — below ~780 the
header subtitle wraps the title out of its bar. A phone is ~360–430 CSS
px wide. The sidebar collapses to icons below 900px, which is a
laptop-sized breakpoint, not a phone one. Beyond width: the app is built
on hover (the marquee's hover mode, tooltips), right-click context
menus, a keyboard shortcut layer with its own overlay and settings page,
multi-select with ctrl/shift, and a resizable-column track list. None of
those are gestures.
This is not a stylesheet pass. It is a second front end for the views
worth having on a phone, sharing the stores and bindings — which the
architecture supports, since a view is already a lazily-loaded chunk
behind VIEW_LOADERS.
B3. Tag writing cannot reach the user's files.
tagwriter rewrites tags in place, and autotag's whole purpose is
applying them to a folder. Under scoped storage that is impossible
outside the sandbox without a SAF write grant per tree. If A1 lands on
MediaStore, in-place tag writing needs MediaStore write requests and
user confirmation per file on Android 11+.
Autotagging is arguably a desktop-only feature and saying so is a legitimate answer.
B4. The Explore catalog is a ~0.6 GB download into app-private storage.
It works — but with no awareness of a metered connection and no
accounting for a device where that is a meaningful fraction of free
space. At minimum it needs to be opt-in on mobile and to refuse a
metered network by default. Android.NetworkJSON() reports
{connected,type}, so the signal is available.
C. Inert, and fine
Window geometry, menus and the system tray are documented no-ops on
mobile. The keyboard shortcut layer is harmless but its Settings page
is dead weight. profiling is already compiled out of production
builds. These cost nothing and need no work.
D. Unknown until it runs on a device
Nothing in section A or B has been observed on Android, because the
x86_64 emulator cannot run the app (B1) and emulator 37 refuses arm64
images on an x86_64 host. Everything above is read from the source, the
generated manifest and Wails' own documentation. The first real device
run will find things this list does not have, and the most likely
places are audio latency and buffering under oto/oboe, and SQLite
behaviour on app-private storage.
The fork in the road
The four blockers in section A are all the same question wearing different clothes: is the Android app a librarian, or a player?
YellowJacket on the desktop is a librarian. It scans folders, deduplicates covers, detects duplicate tracks, reconciles against MusicBrainz, rewrites tags on disk, and manages downloads. That model rests on owning a filesystem, which is precisely what Android declines to give.
Three coherent products, and only the first is "parity":
- Full librarian on Android. Requires
MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE(Obtainium-only distribution, which we already have), a phone UI for every view, and media-session playback. Largest scope by far; the result is an app almost nobody has asked for on a phone. - A player for music already on the phone. MediaStore as the source, no scanner, no autotag, no downloads; the library, queue, playlists, favourites and Explore-as-browsing all still make sense. This is a genuinely good Android app and it is not parity — it is a subset with a different data source.
- A companion to the desktop app. The phone browses and controls the desktop's library over the network, or syncs a subset. Smallest Android surface, and it leans on the thing that already works.
Option 2 is the recommendation if the goal is an app people use; option 3 if the goal is the least work for the most value. Option 1 is the only one that answers "feature parity" literally, and it is the one worth arguing hardest against.
Decided: option 1's data model (the librarian keeps its filesystem and its scanner — A1 shipped that) with option 2's surface. The phone is a player over the library this app already builds; it does not get every view. The list is below.
The phone gets a subset (decided)
B2 is not a stylesheet pass and not a second front end either. A view
is already a lazily-loaded chunk behind VIEW_LOADERS /
DETAIL_LOADERS in index.ts, and the stores and bindings are shared,
so the phone build is a different loader table and a different
chrome, over the same stores.
In, because each is something a person does with a phone in their hand:
- Home — the shelves are already a phone-shaped surface.
- Library browse — albums, artists, genres. The grids are already virtualized and card-shaped.
- Now playing — which on a phone is a view, not a 4em bar.
- The queue.
- Search — the header box, scoped as it already is.
- Playlists, including smart ones, as lists to play rather than to edit.
Out, and each for a reason rather than by omission:
- Autotag — the review UI is a wide table and the action rewrites files on disk; B3 has not been verified even as possible yet.
- Downloads — two tab panels of client configuration.
- Explore — the catalog is a ~0.6 GB download (B4); browsing it is the last thing to earn a phone's storage.
- Settings — not the page. The phone needs a handful of settings (theme, the library folder, playback) and not the 93 controls the desktop page carries.
- Jobs, shortcuts overlay, column configuration — a phone has no keyboard and no resizable columns, and the jobs indicator is enough.
What the shell has to lose, from the audit at the top of this section: the 800×600 minimum, the 11-item sidebar (a phone wants a bottom tab bar over the five things above), hover as a route to anything, right-click as the only route to a context menu (long-press is the gesture), and ctrl/shift multi-select.
One rule for the work: no view forks. A phone layout that copies a view's template is two templates to fix every bug in. Where a view cannot serve both, the split belongs at the chunk boundary that already exists.
Phase 1 followed that rule and found its cost: reusing <app-sidebar>
inside the drawer means reusing its data-testids too, and a second
copy standing by in the DOM broke 30 specs that had nothing to do with
the phone. The rule holds — a second list of destinations would be
worse — but a shared component must be rendered only when it is wanted,
and the guard belongs in a test that names the reason.
What is worth doing regardless of that decision
Cheap, independently useful, and each unblocks measurement:
- Drop
x86_64fromabiFilters(B1) — or keep it and document why. Five minutes. //go:build linux && !androidonmpris_linux.go(A3), so the Android build stops carrying a D-Bus client. Small.- A device smoke run, which needs someone's phone and the published APK. Everything in D depends on it, and it is the single highest information-per-minute action available.
- Make the first-run wizard fail legibly rather than inertly (A2)
— the picker's error already routes through
describeError, but the wizard still blocks pointer events, so an Android user sees a dead screen rather than a sentence. Even under option 3 this is the right behaviour.
What is left (updated after A4)
A4 is done. backend/mediacontrols/android.go is a Handler
beside the MPRIS one, and the Java half is
WailsForegroundService.java: a MediaSession, a MediaStyle
transport notification and audio focus. It needed no new JNI and no new
Gradle dependency — application.Android.StartForegroundService(json)
going out, WailsBridge.emitEvent → the application event bus coming
back, and the platform android.media.session API rather than
androidx.media, which minSdk 21 makes available anyway.
Four decisions in it are worth keeping:
- Ducking is a player concept, not a volume change.
Player.SetDuckre-applies the user's level with an attenuation offset, sogetUserVolumestill reports what the user chose and nothing is persisted or emitted. A duck that wrote through to the volume would let one notification tone permanently turn the music down. - The duck path is pre-Oreo only. From API 26 the framework ducks
the app itself and sends no
CAN_DUCKfocus change, so asking to be told instead (setWillPauseWhenDucked) would mean pausing for every notification tone, and doing both would attenuate twice. - An unchanged payload is not an event here either. Every push crosses JNI and re-delivers an Intent, and the player pushes state on several paths that can agree.
- After the first start, updates use
startService. From Android 12 an app in the background may not start a foreground service, but it may keep delivering intents to one it already has — which is every track change with the screen off.
The contract with Java — the payload keys, the state words, the command
names — is in androidpayload.go, deliberately without the android
build tag, so go test exercises it on every platform. Everything left
in android.go is untested by construction: it compiles only under a
cross-compiler and runs only on a phone.
B1 is done: x86_64 is dropped. 27.1 MB → 15.9 MB, measured. Three
places had to agree — abiFilters, the Makefile's android:package
(or Go still compiles a library Gradle then discards) and the
native-code: 'arm64-v8a'$ assertion in android-apk.yml, whose
anchor is what stops it also matching the fat APK's line. Adding the
ABI back, if modernc ever fixes Xlstat64, is those same three edits.
B2, the desktop shell. Scope decided (below) and phase 1 is
done: the shell itself. Below 600px the sidebar column is gone,
<bottom-nav> is the primary navigation, and the shell fits 320px
exactly — measured, from 652px in a 360px viewport before. What is left
is the views: a full-screen now-playing (which is where seeking and
volume went), long-press for the context menus that are right-click
today, and the track list's resizable columns, which are a pointer
feature with no touch equivalent.
B3/B4 are unchanged, and B3 is now possible where it was not:
with all-files access, tagwriter can write in place.
What none of section A answered
Nothing here has been observed on a device. The permission flow in
particular is the kind of thing that behaves differently across OEM
builds — ACTION_MANAGE_APP_ALL_FILES_ACCESS_PERMISSION is
implemented inconsistently, which is why there is a fallback to the
global list, and neither path has been exercised.
A4 adds its own list of things only a device can answer, and they are
the likely first failures: whether the notification appears at all
(POST_NOTIFICATIONS is requested from startForegroundService, so a
user who declines gets a service with an invisible notification),
whether audio focus arrives while oto/oboe holds the output, whether
the lock screen picks up the session, and whether cover art decoded
from a MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE path is readable by the service.