It’s out. Parachord for Android v0.4.0-beta.2 is the first public beta of the mobile app, and anyone with an Android phone and a taste for music that lives in too many places at once can now install it.
If you’ve been following along, this has been a minute in the making. I built the first working Android app in four days back in March, then hit pause before shipping to re-architect the foundation so Android and a future iOS app could share most of their code. This beta is the first release that sits on top of that new foundation — and it’s the first one I’m comfortable putting in anyone else’s hands.
What It Is
Parachord for Android is the whole app — not a remote, not a companion, not a cut-down mobile experience. It’s a unified music player that pulls Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, and your local files into a single library and a single queue, and plays whichever source has the best match for whatever you’re trying to hear.
A partial list of what’s in this build:
- Unified playback across Spotify (via Spotify Connect), Apple Music (via MusicKit in a headless WebView), SoundCloud (native ExoPlayer), local files (with artwork extraction), and Bandcamp (browser-based)
- The resolver pipeline from desktop, with the same priority-first, confidence-second scoring and the same 60% confidence floor so you don’t end up with the wrong track
- Playlist sync — Spotify import/export, hosted XSPF playlists with 5-minute polling, and dedup logic that keeps re-syncing from multiplying your playlists
- Scrobbling to ListenBrainz, Last.fm, and Libre.fm, with automatic MusicBrainz ID enrichment
- Shuffleupagus, the AI DJ chat — bring your own key for ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini
- Discovery — personalized recommendations blending ListenBrainz and Last.fm, Fresh Drops from artists you follow, Critical Darlings with AI-summarized review blurbs, Pop of the Tops global charts, and Weekly Jams / Weekly Exploration pulled from ListenBrainz
- Friends — see what your Last.fm and ListenBrainz contacts are listening to right now, right from the sidebar and listen along with them
- Concerts via Ticketmaster and SeatGeek, with the same “On Tour” indicator from desktop
- Smart links through
go.parachord.comwith per-service listen buttons - The .axe plugin system — the same 19 plugins as desktop, running in a WebView with hot-reload
- A home screen widget and background playback that survives screen-off and Doze
What’s Different Under the Hood
If you read the re-architecture post, a lot of that work is already visible in this build. The app is Kotlin Multiplatform-ready: the database is SQLDelight, dependency injection is Koin, Ktor clients are scaffolded in the shared module (Retrofit still handles the app-side calls for now — a cleanup task, not a blocker), and a substantial chunk of the business logic now lives in the shared module. That’s the work that makes iOS possible later without rewriting the resolver pipeline, the scrobblers, the AI providers, or any of the metadata plumbing.
The platform-specific stuff — ExoPlayer, the MediaSession, the foreground Service, the MusicKit WebView bridge, the widget — stays native, and honestly that’s the part that took the most debugging. Background audio on Android is a constant negotiation with the OS, and getting the silent-audio-keep-alive pattern right for Apple Music playback in a backgrounded WebView was the single hardest thing in the whole project. It works now. I’ve been daily-driving it for weeks.
Known Limitations
It is a beta, and an early one, so here’s what’s not in this build or not working the way I want it to yet:
- Apple Music sync is playback-only — you can play from Apple Music, but library sync isn’t wired up yet
- YouTube resolver is disabled on mobile — Chromium’s WebView hits Google’s consent-redirect wall before the plugin gets a chance to run. May return if that becomes resolvable.
- Ollama local-LLM provider is disabled on mobile for now
- Cross-fade, gapless, and loudness normalization aren’t tuned for mobile yet
- Some ListenBrainz cover art loads slowly the first time around while the cache warms up
If you hit something that looks like a bug, please file an issue — logs are enormously helpful. I’m still the only set of eyes on most of this.
How to Install
Two options:
- Grab the APK directly from the latest release and sideload it. Android 8.0+ (API 26) required.
- Join the Parachord-Testers Google Group and you’ll get automatic updates as new builds go out.
Spotify Premium is required for Spotify playback, and an Apple Music subscription is required for Apple Music playback. AI features and concert plug-ins use your own API keys — Parachord doesn’t run a backend.
What’s Next
Lots. The must-haves of the Kotlin Multiplatform migration are done — Ktor, SQLDelight, Koin, and the shared module are all in place, and the business logic that needs to cross platforms already has. What’s left is cleanup: moving a few of the remaining platform abstractions into the shared module and tightening the seams. Nothing on the critical path to iOS is still blocking.
The bigger list is fixes the bugs you all are certain to run into - I love to say that music apps are comprised entirely of corner-cases, and how you all listen will be different than how I do. After that I want to further build out sync - both to/from Apple Music as well as more complex use cases across multiple nodes and services. Also, I really need a better first-time user onboarding experience for this app - but in the meantime, just head to settings and setup all your plugins.
And at some point in that not too distance future, once the shared module is where it needs to be, iOS. That’s still the reason all of this is structured the way it is.
But for today: it’s out, it’s real, and you can install it. Thanks for sticking with it.
— J (I’m @jherskowitz pretty much everywhere - except X)
Parachord is an open-source, multi-source music player. Download the Android beta, or grab the desktop app for macOS, Windows, or Linux.