# Future of Mixing Station for Android

Over the last few years android has been involving quite a lot. The most recent changes will have some major implications for Mixing Station.

Initially Mixing Station was build for the X32 and android only. A bit later came the Qu version which has been distributed as a separate app. This choice has been made since the IAP (in app payment) support on Amazon was quite horrible at the time. Thus distributing multiple apps was the logical choice. With the support of other platforms I had the chance to merge all features into a single app.

At that point I also thought about merging all android apps together but didn't want to disturb the majority of the users with downloading a new app (and possibly migrating licenses).

# Android 10/11

Fast forward to end of 2019 when google announced that access to the internal storage for apps will be prohibited in Android 11. This has a major impact for mixing station on android because all apps are sharing the same setting folder. Multiple features depend on this behaviour, and it's the most convenient way for the user since you don't want to change the same setting for all apps.

So what does that mean for the future of the android version? Well there are a couple of things:

Current Android 10/11 users will still be able to use the app, but each instance will have their own settings, buried in the data folder of android.
To prevent this issue I'm planing to merge all android apps into one. This is a rather complicated step since it involves license handling and setting migration.

# The current plan

A new app will be published at some point which contains all mixers and features (as on ios and desktop). Free features will still exist, as it is the case today. You will be able to purchase the pro features via the dev-core license system or via google play. Since google gets a 30% cut I'll add a bit of difference in price between the two payment options to make the dev-core licensing a bit more attractive.
Users who already have a pro version installed will automatically receive a license for the correlating feature(s) once they first open the app.
The existing MixingStation folder will be copied to the by android recommended location.

I already started working on point 1, but my estimate is that this will take until end of 2020 for a complete rollout. Since this is a major change the plan is to have a quite long public beta phase in which existing users can validate the license and setting migration process as well as provide general feedback.