I've gotta say, this was the most irresponsible Kodi release yet.

It's never been fun to upgrade Kodi (something inevitably breaks), but this is by far the worst upgrade of all. And now to find out that the automatically updated version that showed up on my Android TV is unmaintained..?! That takes the cake.

Even though Python 2 was set to EOL with 6 years warning (12 if you count the original timeline), Kodi didn't announce a change until last summer, I believe. So of course the vast majority of completely useful, basic utility plugins weren't updated, there was no enforced transitional upgrade path, and now we're stuck with an unmaintained Android version that contains this massive codebase change and 80% broken plugins.

Don't get me wrong, I'm very grateful for all the work the Kodi devs do. It's an immensely helpful program and by far the most used in my house. But this whole thing reeks of bad decisions.

There are no doubt going to be a significant number of issues found once plugins are upgraded (how can you tell the new system is stable enough for release when there are so exceedingly few plugins that work anymore?), and Android users are indefinitely in the dark as issues arise.

This version didn't have to be pushed out to Google Play, and knowing there was no maintainer makes such a choice hugely irresponsible. "We had to upgrade from Python 2.6 in case there are CVEs in the now defunct version!" makes sense. But now we have an unmaintained version in Android that broke everything, so if there are CVEs... guess who's not getting them? (Granted, it's sandboxed, so I'm not sure the concern makes a lot of sense on Android, but still.)

The Python 2/3 netsplit has been such a thorn for so long, so I can't entirely blame the Kodi devs. And it's not like a Kodi 18/19 netsplit would be a "good" idea. But this automatic, breaking change with no warning and no maintainer is seriously bad form.

"We're lucky we got the final Android 19 Matrix build out at all," is definitely not how I see it. "Lucky" would be Android users missing this very broken upgrade until they got all their ducks in a row and maybe more plugins are updated.

(And the whole, "well fix it/maintain it yourself," is a pretty poor response to bad project management in a project of this size, in case anyone is so inclined to suggest that. I maintain enough other OSS right now, thank you.)

walks off stage

It was announced in January 2018 that Kodi 19 will move to Python 3 so addon devs had plenty of time.

Thank you for clarifying that.

After my Kodi 19 broke, I went searching for some discussion on the plugins I use. Pretty much every discussion I saw where the dev of the broken plugin acknowledged the transition did so during last summer.

Not sure if it was just coincidence, or if Kodi said, "look, y'all, we're moving forward! Get on it!"

That makes this release a little better. Still doesn't make releasing a known-unmaintained version on a platform more palatable, though.

They pushed out v19 on Android to ensure it wasn't the best version. 18.9 unmaintained is better than 19 on the other platforms, which is sad. I run Kodi on a FireTV Cube and it looks like I won't be updating from 18.9 for a very long time.

It'd be interesting to know if the folks who worked on Android walked off stage (to use your words) due to the additional fuss with the Python 3 switch.

This whole thing is really yet-another fault of Python 3, heck of a legacy. Probably the worst and least advantageous break, in one of the more popular programming languages, ever. You could blame the maintainers for embracing it. I'm not a Python expert, but there is no good answer other than stop supporting programming languages with poor backwards compatibility. An option may have been something like a transitional measure in the system that addons import Python-Future or they won't work, and after a year or two of that, release a version of Kodi that is Python 3 only.

I wonder how hard it is to move a big codebase like this off of python to a language where programs have a longer half life.

Alternatively, has anyone considered creating an LTS python version? Back in the old days, debian’s perl maintainers effectively did this for a subset of cpan, and it worked well.

Both Lua and Ruby—very embeddable scripting languages—have had excellent track records of forwards compatibility. (Usually requiring extremely simple changes if that.)

Python went the way of Perl 5/6 (though to a much lesser extent) with their upgrade and broke several fundamental language features.

To this day, I still don't understand the aesthetic reason people seem to prefer Python over something like Ruby. I get all the institutional reasons (Python was adopted by academia), and I get the performance reasons (Python used to be much faster), but with the exception of scientific stuff, the library support is pretty darn identical between the two languages.

And, at least among the few people I taught Ruby to that had previous Python experience, every single one said, "oh, this is a lot easier to understand/use."

Obviously, opinions are like... well. But my very humble opinion of Python is that its reputation is undeserved, is not as intuitive as a pseudocode language as Ruby is, and frankly I think the really painful, protracted transition from Python 2.6 to 3 is more a product of people who really only understand 1 programming language not wanting to change. (I see it as the modern BASIC.)

But I'm not here to start a flame war. Just saying there are other reasonable languages that are easy to learn and much more stable than Python's 2/3 transition.

Python 2.7 was the previous LTS version: it lived for 8 years IIRC, of which 5 weren’t originally planned.

Even LTS versions get sunset at some point.

A lot of folks on reddit are complaining that SMB no longer works on their Android TV devices.

Why would you want to run Kodi on Android when you can run it on Linux ?

Not trying to be snarky, really want to understand.

Many people have Android TV on their TVs, or boxes like Nvidia Shield.

While a Raspberry Pi is a pretty simple way to get Linux/Kodi on the TV, getting it to integrate well is a whole other story. (Remotes, CEC, other services like Netflix, etc.)

I'm your typical Linux hacker of 20 years, but even I switched from Raspberry Pi to Nvidia Shield a couple years ago because the pain of using and maintaining it is so much lower for an interface that should be as simple as "pick and play".

Funny you should mention that. CEC integration is much better on the Pi than on the shield IME. Kodi can't detect other CEC devices and allow to configure its behaviour on the shield (like pause video when switching channels on the TV, control what to do when sleeping, etc).

Likewise with remotes, they work as well, if not better, on the Pi (you can even solder an IR receiver or emitter if you want).

Of course, Netflix is another story, but that's because of DRM, and I decided long ago I wouldn't use any service with DRM.

For me, I use a Shield because of the technicals. It‘s currently the most complete solution if you want dolby vision/atmos capable playback with local stuff (plex/kodi) and streaming services. The shield pro 2019 is also the only box that manages to play 100gb+ 4K stuff without issues. Most people don‘t care about that though.

Android TV already has apps that do a much better job than Kodi, so the question remains.

To pick one of your examples, Netflix has its own app.

Netflix has a better app to use the Netflix service, but it's totally useless for our own collection.

Kodi is easily the best game in town to consume self-hosted media. Or, at least navigate it.

I run it on an Android TV. I'm thinking of plugging small device running Linux though, like a raspberry pi because my tv (a sony from 2015) is not maintained anymore as the last update introduced a huge amount of bugs (the tv can't play a lot of h264 videos, h263 videos doesn't work at all).

This is why my next TV will just be a 43" monitor, not anything "smart". After all that's how I am using my current TV set, which does not even have a DVB tuner. Since modern TVs are effectively computers that are controlled with a remote control, I might as well use a real computer and manage myself the software that it runs.

Easy to install and use on several Android TV boxes out there. NVIDIA Shield perhaps?

Cause there are hundreds of cheap android TV boxes one can buy which don't run Linux. Also kodi for android runs on amazon's fire sticks and Googles new chromecast (the Google tv one)

You can use streaming apps on the same device not so with linux. On Kodi android you can even get 4k hdr netflix with the input steam addon.

Just to add what others said, could also run it on android tables. Sadly, the linux-running tablet options aver very limited.

That explains why there's no actual support for AndroidTV services and background refresh.

ugh, I suppose that's why the android TV (shield TV) version feels so unpolished?