Nuvola Player Project Enters Maintenance Mode

Failing to overcome technical challenges in a timely manner, the Nuvola Player project has discontinued active development. The project enters a one-year maintenance mode and will deliver integration bug fixes on a best-effort basis until the final End-of-Life on December 31, 2022.

Maintenance mode

Nuvola Player issue tracker on GitHub is still open for reporting issues. Each bug report will be individually assessed whether it is feasible to fix the problem in a timely manner.

Integration issues caused by streaming website updates are likely to be accepted unless a particular streaming service becomes incompatible with the old web engine in Nuvola Player. In that unfortunate case, a standard refund policy applies.

The maintenance mode ends on December 31st, 2022. This date is the final End-of-Life deadline.

Technical Challenges

Nuvola Player is facing a lot of technical challenges and issues that need to be addressed and would require a significant time investment. The four major unresolved problems are:

• Porting Nuvola to a new rendering engine as the current one is too old and insufficient for modern streaming services.
• Native Wayland support.
• Porting Nuvola from GTK 3 to GTK 4.
• Reworking Nuvola distribution to a single flatpak package published on Flathub.

Unfortunately, I cannot allocate sufficient time to address the problems as I agreed to help with the EpiHub project (a dashboard for Czech regional hygiene stations used to coordinate anti-pandemic measures) in my spare time.

In addition, my interest has shifted away from desktop development and client-side web applications, so it is harder for me to keep up with the new challenges and technologies, especially with the various JavaScript APIs and frameworks used by streaming services.

There are also additional personal reasons I’m not going to discuss.

As a result, I’ve decided to gracefully discontinue the project instead of giving you false hope that the problems will get eventually resolved.

Thank you

I would like to thank all users of Nuvola Player over the years and anyone who participated in the development of Nuvola Player. I’m especially grateful to the users who purchased the Nuvola license and make it possible to provide a one-year maintenance mode instead of terminating the project abruptly.

I’m sorry that I cannot keep the project in active development anymore.

Jiri Janousek, Nuvola Player core developer