Bandzone player unofficial

BandzonePlayer unofficial is an Android app that plays and downloads tracks which are otherwise only available for playing and downloading in the player on the Bandzone.cz website, a site that hosts pretty much every band ever formed in Czechia and Slovakia. The portal is therefore used above all by fans outside the mainstream and the commercial current, which was one of the motivations for building this app as well.

Other arguments that led to building this app:

• The design of the Bandzone.cz website - the site has been in its unchanged form since roughly the days the CZ/SK internet came into being. That alone would not matter so much, but in the era of mobile devices, in 2021, it is simply not enough any more and the UX on a device like that is catastrophic
• The near total absence of the SK/CZ garage and underground punk/rock scene on the big foreign streaming platforms
• Availability of tracks offline - the website itself does nothing about the situation where the user is offline and would like to listen to some tracks, which streaming apps such as Spotify do allow.
• Easier access to tracks for offline playback - the user does not have to mess about downloading tracks from the web, then connecting the phone to a PC and copying the collection onto the phone's storage
• Saving data
• • When searching for bands and playing tracks, there is no need to load the whole website.
  • Saved tracks are played from the device's storage, and the app itself works in 100% offline mode

The app works in tandem with a scraping Spring Boot backend https://kovo.space/projekty/music-pages-scraper

The app is not and will not be available in the Google Play Store: in the Android development handbooks and guidelines, a Spotify-style music player is given as the textbook example of an app that is barred from the store.