A podcast-first player for your own Audiobookshelf server.
Catch up on what's new, queue it, take it offline, and listen in the car — on Android.
Every build ships two APKs: podshelf-*.apk for your phone and podshelf-wear-*.apk for a Wear OS watch.
Catch up · Minimal mode · Stats & badges · Library
A fork of the Audiobookshelf mobile app, reworked around podcast listening rather than audiobooks, with offline use and Android Auto treated as primary cases rather than extras.
Podshelf is a client. It needs an Audiobookshelf server to connect to and provides no content of its own.
Podcast workflow
- Catch up — one feed of unplayed episodes across your podcast libraries, oldest first, on the home screen.
- Minimal mode — the whole app reduced to one play control. No list to browse; it decides what is next by reading the library, and finishes a half-heard episode before starting anything new.
- Per-podcast rules — exclude a show from the queue, or keep only its newest N unplayed episodes, so one back catalogue cannot bury everything else.
- Auto cache unplayed episodes — downloads them in the background so they are ready without a connection.
Offline, as a first-class state
- Disconnect / Continue Offline — go offline deliberately and keep the normal app around you, rather than dropping to a bare file list.
- Reachability is judged by whether the server answered, not by whether the radio is up — so plane wifi, captive portals and patchy coverage behave sensibly instead of stalling on timeouts.
- Offline, the queue is built from what is actually on disk, so it never offers a stream it cannot play.
In the car and on the lock screen
- Android Auto browsing and playback with a working queue, skip/seek and playback speed.
- A proper media session, so lock screen, notification, watch and headset controls all work.
Large screens and foldables
- Content stops stretching past 600dp, where Android's medium window size class begins.
- Tabletop posture — with a foldable propped open and the hinge across the screen, the player lays the artwork out above the hinge instead of centring it across the fold.
Listening stats worth opening
- Streaks, an 18-badge ladder, and progress toward the next one.
Under the hood this fork has also moved Nuxt 2 → 3, Vuex → Pinia and ExoPlayer2 → Media3.
Download the podshelf-*.apk from the latest release,
or from the test page, which shows the build date
and commit. Every push to master publishes both.
- Android will ask you to allow installing from an unknown source the first time.
- These are debug builds, signed with the repo's debug key, package id
com.podshelf.app.debug. - Android only — iOS is not built or released here.
- It installs alongside upstream's Play Store app rather than replacing it.
Coming from a build made before the rename? The application id changed from
com.audiobookshelf.apptocom.podshelf.app. Android treats that as a different app, so this installs alongside the old one rather than upgrading it, and app-private storage does not carry over — downloads have to come down again. Listening progress lives on your server, so it survives.
| Roadmap | What is planned, what shipped, and the reasoning behind each |
| Development | Building, the checks, screenshots, CI |
| Tech debt | Deliberate compromises and the condition that clears each |
| CLAUDE.md | Codebase constraints — state management, theming, where tests go |
| Plexamp study | What a well-loved player does well, and what transfers |
| Play Store | Release signing and the Play Console process |
All of the hard work belongs to advplyr and the Audiobookshelf contributors. This is a personal fork tuned to one podcast-heavy listening habit. If you want the supported app, use upstream:
- Upstream app — advplyr/audiobookshelf-app
- Server — advplyr/audiobookshelf
- Project site — audiobookshelf.org
- Discord — discord.gg/pJsjuNCKRq
Licensed under the same terms as upstream — see LICENSE.