This release brings the first part of the architecture change which is ongoing at the app. David Gonzalez, Android app developer, just wrote a great article about the new MVVM architecture of the app.

The architecture improvements are completely under the hood; this means there is not much new to see in this release for users – except less error messages and waiting times of course!

The Big Sharing Rewrite

Sharing is the first part of the app which follows the new architecture approach now. The whole part of the code which takes care of the sharing was rewritten to clean it up. Sometimes it’s more fun to tear the whole house down and build it anew!

This means that there are improvements in performance and stability. For example sharing files uses less RAM now, and opening the sharing view is faster. A quick measure how much faster it is:

The rewrite brings a gradual change to the Kotlin programming language; Sharing is now written completely in Kotlin. Kotlin makes it easier for the community to contribute; it’s also faster and more reliable than Java, leading to less crashes and other bugs.

If you want to contribute, get in touch with the Android team! ownCloud is Open Source of course, and if you miss a feature in the app, you can always write it yourself instead of waiting for it. Your help is highly appreciated, and maybe you can learn something new. Join #mobile on talk.owncloud.com if you have questions or need a hint where to start.

Download the App!

Apart from that, this release contains mostly bugfixes and small improvements – while the progress is mostly invisible to the user, David can write more than 1500 words about what they changed under the hood. It’s a big step!

To benefit from the recent improvements, upgrade the app or install it from the Google Play Store:

Get the newest release!

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