New Features

• Added native Google Assistant integration — say "Play [song name] on Echo Music" to search and play instantly.
• Added Ambient Mode accessible from the player menu, featuring landscape orientation, split-screen album art with live lyrics, and gesture-based playback controls.
• Added background music recognition via Quick Settings tile and widget — identify songs without opening the app.
• Added double-tap on album art center to play/pause.
• Added lossless music quality indicators to the player UI.
• Added a listening summary feature for statistics.
• Added Echo Brain Mixes dynamic row on the Home Screen — generates fully offline, personalized AI playlists from your listening history.
• Added Groq as an AI provider for lyrics translation under Settings → AI (supports Llama, Qwen3, Gemma2, and more). (#534 by @nitheeshdr)
• Selecting Saavn (320kbps) or Lossless (Qobuz) quality now shows a notice that these streams run on Echo Music's servers, with a direct Donate button.
• Added Unison to the Service Uptime screen under Lyrics Providers.
• Added Lyrics Providers and Other Services (Apple Music API, Echo Find) to the Service Uptime settings screen.

Echo Brain Improvements

• Re-architected Echo Brain queueing to use "Runway" batch injection (3 tracks at once) for smoother continuous playback.
• Echo Brain suggestions now queue immediately to play next instead of at the bottom of the playlist.
• Removed the 30-second delay — the queue is populated instantly from the first song.
• Fixed an interaction logging gap where songs skipped between 15s and 30s were not being tracked.
• Added an AI indicator icon in the queue for Echo Brain-suggested tracks.
• Added a "Not Interested" option in the queue menu to penalize AI recommendations.
• Integrated Echo Brain Flow Neuroengine to analyze listening habits and inject intelligent recommendations.

Settings & Navigation

• Moved the "Supported Links" shortcut from About to Settings → System Updates.
• Improved Settings search to group results by page, navigate directly to the matching page, and highlight the relevant setting visually.
• Added Echo Brain options to Settings search.
• Grouped search results in settings for faster navigation.
• Redesigned Echo Brain settings page to follow Material 3 aesthetics.
• Moved the Cast button from the top of the player to the song menu, above Ambient Mode.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed the Cast icon not appearing in the Apple Music theme. (#533 by @nitheeshdr)
• Fixed Canvas animations and Artist Backgrounds stopping by implementing dynamic Apple Music token extraction.
• Fixed an issue where playing a song from the Suggestions tab would occasionally play a different song due to incorrect compound artist name matching.
• Fixed a crash in music recognition (Shazam) caused by invalid timeout parameters.
• Fixed a rendering issue in the mini-player where invalid crossfade options prevented the thumbnail from displaying.
• Fixed stream mismatch issues where changing audio quality mid-playback could play the wrong track. Audio quality changes now apply cleanly from the next track.
• Fixed network buffering timeouts that caused playback to enter an endless loading loop instead of showing a recovery error.
• Fixed missing album art for downloaded tracks saved without a thumbnail link.
• Fixed missing artwork for local media files on Android 10 and newer due to scoped storage changes.
• Fixed high-resolution album artwork from JioSaavn not mapping correctly to the player and database.
• Fixed a crash (FileNotFoundException) when attempting to play or crossfade into local media files that have been deleted.
• Fixed crashes related to ExoPlayer playback stats reporting and ForegroundServiceStartNotAllowedException.
• Fixed an issue where the skeleton/shimmer loading structure was incorrectly fading out and cutting off content.
• Fixed a bug where all user stats, song history, and downloaded songs were erased on app update due to accidental database deletion on startup.
• Fixed Backup and Restore failing with a "backup is from a newer app version" error despite being from the same version.
• Fixed a black screen crash during large local media imports caused by heavy memory usage and synchronous sorting on the main thread.
• Removed debug println statements from release builds and hardened thread safety in Listen Together (replacing mutable maps with ConcurrentHashMap, marking session fields as @Volatile, and improving Spotify auth security). (#507 by @devmustafashf1)

Stability & Performance

• Improved Backup and Restore by streaming large files efficiently and moving operations to background threads, preventing OOM crashes and UI freezes.
• Improved Listen Together synchronization by tracking network latency via automatic ping/pong requests.
• Re-enabled Lossless quality options with improved stream resolution fallback logic.
• Improved track matching to correctly handle songs with multiple or featured artists.
• Bumped internal database version with migration to preserve user data.
• Cleaned up the Home screen by removing Uploaded and Podcast chips from the UI.