No one uses the same software forever. I’ll be (pleasantly?) surprised if I’m still using Roon five years from now.
You have to use the software that works for you and with your hardware. Or, you have to use the hardware that works for you and with your sofware. It just depends, are you wedded to a piece of hardware or are you wedded to a piece of software?
I started with a Dell laptop, iPhone, iPad, Oppo 203, and Bose 5.1 system. It just so happened, I discovered Roon and Roon worked with all of it. Roon also worked with Tidal which I already had.
Then, came the Nucleus, some headphone gear, and Qobuz.
I guess, if you’re willing to throw it all out and start from scratch, you could do that. No telling where you would end up.
All software has compromises and limitations to some extent. The issue with Android really isn’t Roon specific, other software have same issues with Android. Only specific ones developed purely for the platform seem to get around it.
For multiplatform devs It’s a matter of making it stable and compatible with minimum support which is what Roon have done with their resampling method. Android playback on Roon prior to this was awful due to it relying on the hardware to do it.
UAPP only has to deal with Android so it’s code is designed purely for it so dev only has one thing to support and even then it’s not great all the time. With every Android device being unique it’s not an easy thing to pull off. Even UAPP doesn’t a lot of the time Androids audio stack is a mess. it never worked reliably enough on my phone and Dragonfly DAC always lost the DAC at the end of every album and he couldn’t do anything about it. The main reason I switched to a DAP.
I would love Roon to work properly as it does on all my other kit, but just don’t see it happening.
A&K were going to be roon enabled years ago I always wonder what went wrong there.