Jason Carr

Happy Easter guys. Just put out beta 16 with the updated translations. Still planning on putting out the official release tomorrow.

The issues run a lot deeper than just the Play Store. Even if we weren't on the stores, we'd still have to contend with the upcoming security restrictions, which may end up killing frontends on Android anyways. That's the biggest problem; we don't want to invest time into a questionable platform. We will probably re-evaluate once things settle down a bit.

Of course, if we do come back to it, we won't make anyone re-purchase it. That'd be pretty scum.

Yes, my understanding at least is that Google Play will continue to allow you to download and use the app if you've previously purchased it.

Ah yes, sorry I forgot about that. I wasn't even aware that the encoding changed, but that shouldn't matter either way.

Not quite yet. We'll be tackling the rest of the top 20 items, and then we'll put out the next poll.

Hi @PiperCalls, I'm sorry to say that this is bad timing. We don't really have a good solution for multi-bin files on Android yet. But furthermore, this: https://forums.launchbox-app.com/topic/54393-the-state-of-launchbox-on-android/

Beta 15 is out now with some simple changes to remove some Wikipedia-related text, and translation updates.

Yeah, per Linux, I'm fairly certain we would run into some very similar issues on Linux, unfortunately (though obviously not the security restrictions issues).

Thanks all, I have the translations updated in beta 15, which I just put out.

We would, but you still have the option to not use the LaunchBox Games Database, so we still need that check box.

No kidding. I still feel like there's room for it.

Thanks for the support.

Update (2021-08-24): Android is back! The official new version is available directly on the main LaunchBox website here: https://www.launchbox-app.com/android-about I've added some notes in green below to clarify some things. Hi all, I wanted to share some news about LaunchBox on Android; I have some good news and some bad news, so I'll start with the bad news. Unfortunately, we will be stopping development on Android for the time being. Android has not at all been good to us, and here are just a few reasons why: Our income on Android has only been around 5% of our total income, with the rest of our income coming from LaunchBox Premium on the desktop. With Google taking 30% of that, we only stand to make $3.50 per copy sold. Update: We have unfortunately had to increase the price with the new version, but anyone who previously purchased from Google Play will of course receive a forever-updates license and will receive all new versions. The new pricing model closely matches the desktop, but is also much cheaper: $10 for a regular license, or $25 for a forever-updates license. These new prices will help to ensure that Android development continues to be feasible for us long-term. Though the income is low, our development effort requirements for Android are about the same as for the Windows applications. It doesn't really make sense for us to be spending half of our development time on the project, while only making a 5% return. Update: Android development of course still takes significant development time, but we do have two full-time developers these days, and the new pricing model will help to make Android development more worth the time. In addition, we are hoping to use the Android version in the future as a base for development on devices such as the Raspberry Pi, which makes it even more worth our while. We've been massively disappointed in the software restrictions on Android. We wanted to be able to run import processes in the background, but that turned out to be impossible due to over-zealous battery-saving restrictions. We wanted to be able to easily allow users to add their own custom emulators, but it turned out to not be easy at all due to Android's poor design for launching other applications. Those are just a couple examples of the restrictions that we're constantly slamming into on Android. Update: Unfortunately we are definitely still very restricted by Android's various poor design issues. None of the above really changes, but we do already have a good product, even if it is restricted by Android's failings. Android is *not* an open platform. In fact, Windows is *far* more open than Android. The Google Play Store is really the only viable way to release apps on Android, and red tape is everywhere. The Amazon App Store is also available of course, but both stores have similar issues, and no app can flourish on Android without being in the stores. We have so much more flexibility on the desktop, and for that reason we would much prefer to focus on it. Update: We are grateful for the changing mindsets lately regarding the app stores. People are starting to realize that they're not ideal, Google is being forced to make some positive changes, and people don't mind side-loading apps as much. The best version of Retroarch is already only available by side-loading it, because the Google Play version is so restricted, so we're seeing not being on the Play Store as much less of an issue these days. It will still likely hurt the popularity of the app, but we feel that it's worth the tradeoff to avoid the Play Store and distribute LaunchBox ourselves. We've also made LaunchBox for Android free for less than 100 games, which should help to increase the adoption. There are major concerns regarding the future of emulation on Android at all. Google has begun severely restricting the ability to share files between applications for security reasons, and it’s already affecting users who are running Android 11. They’ve been pushing for these changes for quite a while now, but they’re a poor solution and they wreak havoc on emulation, because they disallow sending ROM files from a frontend to an emulator, amongst other things. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back for us. Update: Unfortunately this is still an issue. Google did not eliminate the previous storage model as they promised (yet), and we're grateful for that, but the new storage model is still horribly broken and will not work in its current form for emulation frontends at all. Unfortunately this means that emulation frontends on Android are still seriously at risk. Google could disable the previous storage model in the next version of Android, which would pretty much break everything. I don't think they will, but they could, and this leaves the entire situation at risk. Still, we at least want to prove what is possible on Android, so that if Google does end up ruining it, there will be enough of a backlash to get it changed. All that said, we will be stopping development on Android for the time being and focusing our efforts 100% back to the desktop applications. We actually had some really cool features in the works, including wheel and CoverFlow views, but since we’re not even sure if frontends will work at all with future versions of Android, we’ve decided to set it all aside for now. We will be taking LaunchBox for Android off of the Play Store here shortly, as we don’t want to mislead users. It is possible that we could come back to Android at some point, but this is our plan for the time being. Now for the good news: LaunchBox Premium and Big Box on the desktop are doing better than ever, and we are super excited about recent and future developments. We can’t wait to get the new MAME community high scores features out next week, as they’ve been super fun even just while in the betas. We also have some amazing ideas that we can’t wait to jump on. Lastly, if you’re dead-set on Android for emulation, there is a new frontend out that looks very good called RESET Collection. We can’t say if and how they’ll get around Android’s upcoming security restrictions, but we do wish them all the best. Thanks to everyone for your support with all of our projects, and we do apologize for having to disappoint Android users here. At this point, we strongly feel that we are best supporting this community by focusing on the desktop, so that is what we will do going forward.

I can test it @shadowfire; no worries. Feel free to PM me a link if you want, or you can always post it here for others to test as well.

It's all in BoxesContentView.xaml; that should be it. There's a new section with Badges as the binding; I think that's all you need.

It's that time again guys; beta 14 has all the updated translations. We're planning on putting out the official 10.12 release on Monday. Thanks again; I hope everyone is staying safe. @Opak @cyanjiang @Bardock @MajKSA @gamehacker @Cauptain @Kondorito @Nyny77 @alexposad @k_kutsugi @dukeemu

Thank you Claudio, I have this updated in beta 14, which I just put out.

Beta 14 is out now with the following: Improvement: The GOG import wizard now allows you to individually choose custom platform names for each game, or update them in batch Improvement: The Big Box Sleep, Reboot, and Shut Down options have been improved to wait until save operations are complete before proceeding (helps prevent rare data corruption possibilities) Fixed: Wikipedia metadata searching has been removed; it's been broken for a while due to a Wikipedia change and never really worked all that great to begin with Added MAME high scores supported to auto-populated playlists Performance has been improved at the end of the import process I'm looking at this beta as a release candidate. Currently planning on releasing 10.12 this coming Monday.

Hi @drewjbx, where are you seeing it? What are you typically doing when it pops up? Does LaunchBox continue to operate properly after closing the dialog?

@TheNewClassics @drewjbx FYI, just added this to the latest beta (out soon): - Improvement: The Big Box Sleep, Reboot, and Shut Down options have been improved to wait until save operations are complete before proceeding (helps prevent rare data corruption possibilities) Thanks for the report. I haven't been able to replicate that, but that would be unrelated to this.

We'd have to build a new caching system in order to make it happen for retro achievements, so that's not going to happen for this release.

Hmm, I suppose we could filter it to only platforms like "MAME" or "Arcade". We could potentially have issues though for people who use custom platform names. We might just have to deal with that for now. This would only happen if the current directory was changed to the emulator's folder, and then something tried to look for images there, which should be an impossibility for the LaunchBox codebase. All I can figure is that this would be caused by a plugin.

@greatgearprices You may want to get in touch with the bezel project guys, as this seems to be an issue that is specific to that project.

It's hard to know exactly what you're running into here. You should be able to import GDI files without issues, and zip files are extracted (if necessary and enabled) when running games. The Android version is still early compared to the desktop, yes. Keep in mind that nearly 10 years of development have gone into LaunchBox and Big Box on the desktop, so the Android experience is not going to be all the way there right away. If you'd like a refund, just let us know.