DevCon 2018 - Sofia - Part II

Good morning/afternoon/evening/night (delete as appropriate - we're a global community). The world has turned once more, the sun has crawled into the sky, and we're back in the room.

Nate began the day with an update on the Foundation's financial status: income, expenditure, bank balance, sponsorships and revenue sources. The good news is that we're financially stable, but the bad is that we're never going to be rich. Damn this volunteering thing, it's almost like everyone does this for free. Oh, wait...

Next up, garbear took to the stage to talk about the upcoming (and long-anticipated!) RetroPlayer. This is already available in the 18.x "Leia" builds, so you can try it now if you like. As well as a demo to the team, the presentation covered how we're addressing controller topology (including hubbing and mapping), user interface options, configuration, potential for user profiles, binary add-on repository structure, and some potential future features.

Martijn next took us through our current user statistics. Because we do no user tracking, it's always been difficult to get any real numbers, so we're reliant on partial data: Play Store active user counts, Microsoft app store figures, what we see hitting our repos for e.g. scraper or other add-on downloads. In aggregate, we probably have several tens of millions of recently-active users across all platforms and versions - including some active installations on every release since 13.x "Gotham" - plus very many more downloads (which may be dormant/secondary devices, or reinstallations, or users who decided that Kodi just wasn't their thing). This presentation also led into a conversation about release management, specifically, the intended schedule for the upcoming 18.x "Leia" release plus very early timing plans for 19.x "M*".

The next presentation was by kib, giving us an update on all things related to the Kodi infrastructure - build servers, download servers, web hosting, caching. He took us through upgrades to the Windows build system, wiki software upgrade, https implementation, the Kodi paste site, LXD containerisation, OS reinstallation and upgrades, changes to mirror up/down detection, CloudFlare, and more.

Finally, a1rwulf rounded out the day by talking about the Kodi databases: the basic architecture, current limitations, and potential changes that we need to consider as new features are introduced.

A shortened day today, with a couple of topics kicked into Sunday for a variety of reasons. Watch this space for an update on those, as we'll add them in due course, either as an update to this post or as a separate one, depending on content.