First off, apologies if anyone thinks we’ve haven’t been clear about this issue. We’ve spent time investigating this problem, and have provided periodic updates since the initial report. This issue isn’t being ignored.
While this may appear simple to resolve from your perspective, our investigation into these reports over the last few months indicate that resolving this will require a substantial rewrite of our Android audio infrastructure.
It’s always disappointing to us when manufacturers change something out from under us and cause Roon to break. These issues can be very time consuming to handle, and have to be prioritized based on the number of people impacted, especially in a fragmented ecosystem like Android’s where we have a relatively small number of people owning each device.
We do not see a way to fix this in the context of our current Android audio streaming approach–which was designed around the need to support older devices when we launched Android support in 2015. In order to move forward, we need to substantially re-design our interaction with Android’s audio subsystem.
In the context of that project, fixing the LG V30 is a side-benefit, not the main reason to do that work. Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to “pull forward” a workaround for LG’s behavior changes, so this fix is part of a larger project to modernize our Android audio system, and scheduling and completing large projects takes time. That’s why this work didn’t happen in 2018. Once our next major releases is out the door, we will be able to look at scheduling this again.
That’s the point I was trying to make all the way back in June – if this is a confined bug we’ll do everything we can to fix it. If this is environmental, we’ll do what we can to isolate the variables that cause this issue, so we can hopefully identify a workaround. And if this does require wholesale changes to our Android audio implementation, that work is also planned, but with a time frame that is necessarily longer.
I understand that’s not the answer you want. It’s not the answer I want to be delivering either – if I could snap my fingers and have a developer fix this bug tomorrow, our QA team would be testing it by Thursday and you’d have the fix in a few weeks. Since that’s not the case, all I can do is be transparent here.
Over the last few months we did add an LG V30 to our in-house testing gear, so we are now able to confidently work on issues like this in house. But for the moment, I just want to be clear that we are not wasting people’s time asking questions, and we are not ignoring this issue. We do plan to resolve this, and when we have more concrete timelines, we’ll let everyone know.
We appreciate everyone’s patience, and look forward to resolving this issue as soon as possible. Thanks and Happy New Year!