Looking back at 2021, a lot happened in the AntennaPod community. In this blog post, we want to summarize the most important milestones.

App development

Over the course of 2021, 51 contributors helped improve AntennaPod. In total, they made no less than 505 changes (commits) to the source code, touching about 30 000 lines of code. This makes AntennaPod a pretty active project, even though it is run completely by volunteers in their free time.

To give everyone access to the app improvements, we released 9 new updates, of which 3 contained major new features. For the beginning of 2022, we have already developed a release that is nearly ready. This new release of AntennaPod – version 2.5 – will add support for synchronizing your subscriptions with your own Nextcloud instance. That makes it easier than ever to enjoy sync while still keeping your listening habits private!

Donations

After a long period of not accepting donations and users asked for it, in March this year we decided that we will accept donations. Active community members discussed what might and should not be paid for with the money, and finally developed spending guidelines. In nine months we already received € 1 263.75. The first and only spending this year was € 21.60 for a Google Play Console account (to better manage releases). We hope we can put more of the money to good use going forward.

Hello Fediverse

While already present on Twitter, in June we also joined the Fediverse and published our first toot, on Mastodon. (The Fediverse is a network of open and interacting servers, mostly used now for publishing and social interaction. This open source platform fits great with our philosophy.)

Hackathon

From July 9 to July 11, we organized the first (virtual) AntennaPod Hackathon. After an announcement and public polls on the forum, we decided on a date that fits best with the timezones that our contributors live in. We then held a kick-off meeting where we discussed which parts of AntennaPod we plan to work on next. The kick-off meeting was attended by @ByteHamster, @keunes, @Matth78, @tonytamsf and @ueen, with a short visit by @peakvalleytech. Most specifically, we discussed where we want AntennaPod’s user interface to develop in the next years. We agreed on the following long-term changes:

• Developing a home screen with a quick overview over the app.
• Adding another episode state “ignored”, which you can use if you are not interested in an episode, so you do not have to mark episodes as played that are not actually played.
• Renaming the “new” screen to “inbox” and adding it directly to the side drawer.

The Hackathon was very productive, and we will explore in which form we can continue such live contributor interaction in 2022.

Forum

As mentioned above, our forum played an important role in our community. It is the main place where everyone – from active contributors to occasional app users – meets, gets support and discusses features. We can already tell that this year well over 350 topics (discussion threads) were created, filled with more than 2 000 posts. Almost 500 users registered to the forum, bringing the total up to 700+ users. On January 1st, the great forum software (Discourse) will automatically publish a full overview of the forum activity. (So check in on our forum in a few days if you’re reading this in 2021.)

See you again next year

We hope that you had a good year, despite the global pandemic. Having to stay at home is a good time to listen to podcasts, after all 😉 Now, we wish you a good transition into the year 2022, and we will see you again next year!

PS. Don’t hesitate to create a post on our forum if you have any comments about this blog post. As said, it also is a good place to discuss new features and help shape the future of AntennaPod. And if you want to help to make AntennaPod even greater, have a look at our website where we introduce the various ways in which you can contribute to the project, such as translating or coding.