Future Versions of Kodi Might Not Get an Android Port Unless The Project Find Developers

As I shortly mentioned yesterday in LibreELEC post, Kodi has now lost its only Android developer earlier this year due to some disagreements, and the project is now (mostly) maintained in Kodi forks such as SPMC or MrMC. The situation is not yet critical, but if Android developers are not found soon, there may not be an Android version in the future, as mentioned on the latest blog post on Kodi.tv.

Kodi_Android_DeadHere’s the excerpt of that developer post specific to Android:

A Call for Android Devs (and Windows and iOS)

As many of you know, we are a bit shorthanded in the Android development department. While there are actually two projects SPMC and MrMC that have Android devs committing code, the upstream project Kodi has no one at the moment. If you are familiar with C++ and Android development (particularly recent Android TV development) and would like to help, feel free to speak up in our forums. The devs of SPMC and MrMC are very nice people and would likely be happy to mentor you. In addition, much of the early work you’d need to do would be to simply port the work done on SPMC and MrMC into Kodi, so the learning curve shouldn’t be as steep it otherwise might be.

And we can’t stress this enough, if we don’t get an Android dev soon, Kodi for Android could very well die out. This is a significant future problem.

Bold highlights are mine. Since Kodi for Android have been installed over 5 million times on Google Play, the project is definitely popular. Kodi development work is pro bono, and developers would also need to have the skills and time to get involved in the project. Having said, it would be a nice addition to any resume, so if you are interested, or know somebody who would be interested in getting involved, you may want to contact Kodi team. Kodi 17 Android is still being built, but I’ve been told it could still problematic for Amlogic TV boxes, and it’s not only a problem for Kodi 18 or beyond.

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14 Replies to “Future Versions of Kodi Might Not Get an Android Port Unless The Project Find Developers”

  1. Actually, Kodi 17 is in dire need of Android love, already…
    That might not be in the blog post, but the amlogic port is bound to disappear as well if a maintainer is not found real quick.

  2. If SPMC and MrMC both run on Android and have active developers, what would a Kodi (android) developer do differently?

  3. @Koying
    Thanks for all your work on Android-Kodi, Koying.
    Will be getting back to SMPC because of this.
    Hope you don’t abandon aml improvements on SPMC though.

  4. Will be interesting see the reactions of the companies that sell Android devices.

    Ziddo is already using his own port of Kodi (not was possible add the changes to mainline), will use Wetek a similar approach?

  5. I wonder how many of the Android Kodi installs are also watching pirated content via Kodi without banned plugins.

  6. So, if Kodi goes away on Android, what are the chances of getting OpenELEC running on Shield TV? IIRC, nVidia provides a Linux for Tegra, not sure if it provides video acceleration.

  7. @mo123
    For me.. its more like 50%
    Devices with aml802 (vega89h) / 805 (s85) and most Allwinner (a31s/H8/a80) devices are still running Android 4.4
    ~its a shame, most of these devices looked liked the where the best of there time.. ,yet never got updated to lollipop

    Bah..Kodi team really shot them self in the foot.. this time!

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