Android feature requests - Background media sync and Multiple platform importing.

[ChunkyLoverMark]

There are a couple of things that I think would greatly improve the first time set-up for Android Launchbox. I have two feature requests to improve the onboarding experience:

 

Firstly I think it would be better to have persistent background downloading of images videos. Currently what I have to do is change my phone/device screen timeout to 30 minutes and not use my device for the time it takes to update all of the media from each platform. This is massively time consuming for both small and large libraries.

 

With the Launchbox competitor 'Beacon' (not as good as Launchbox), they have a persistent background service that keeps on working even when a different app is being used. This would be a great addition for Launchbox to keep it in memory whilst other phone stuff is being used:

And I also like how another competitor ES-DE (not as good as Launchbox) works on Android. In the set-up flow of the app they give you empty, platform named folders to place all your roms in. This takes away all of the effort of manually adding every single platform one by one how Launchbox currently does it. It's just copy and paste with a file manager and once this has been done once you don't have to do it again because you can reuse the same folders with every setup.

ES-DE recognises what every folder should contain, and this comes in handy when setting up RetroArch and downloading media as it knows what region (eg; sega32x, sega32xjp, sega32xna) and platform the folder is for and needs to pull media for without selecting inside the settings when adding a platform. I know something similar has recently been released for Launchbox for Windows where you can add many platforms at once and it would be great for the same folder structure to be recognised by both Launchbox in Windows and Android.

You could in fact keep both methods, still allow the current manual single platform importing but just important into one of these predefined, named folders, and have the new multi platform way just a copy and paste away. This could keep everyone happy.

With adding these features, it would combine the best features from all of the Android frontend's into one app. Thanks for all you do 🙂

Edited Monday at 08:16 PM by ChunkyLoverMark
Updated 2

[faeran]

Thanks for the feedback.

20 hours ago, ChunkyLoverMark said:

Firstly I think it would be better to have persistent background downloading of images videos. Currently what I have to do is change my phone/device screen timeout to 30 minutes and not use my device for the time it takes to update all of the media from each platform. This is massively time consuming for both small and large libraries.

 

This would be great.

I could see some people not wanting us to have a persistent background service running (we had some pushback on that in the past), but sounds like a solid option.

20 hours ago, ChunkyLoverMark said:

And I also like how another competitor ES-DE (not as good as Launchbox) works on Android. In the set-up flow of the app they give you empty, platform named folders to place all your roms in. This takes away all of the effort of manually adding every single platform one by one how Launchbox currently does it. It's just copy and paste with a file manager and once this has been done once you don't have to do it again because you can reuse the same folders with every setup.

 

Yeah, we do this in our Windows app, and it's great to know that if we brought something similar into the Android app, you'd be down for it.