Use Google Cloud Messaging for downloading podcasts silently
Hi, just a suggestion of a commonly used util :
Instead of clicking manually for an update (or triggering on every launch...), you could go through GMS to trigger updates.
The principle is quite simple : every app, on startup, sends on your server a token.
The server checks regulary for some updates (maybe just the top100 podcasts), and if it founds new content, sends a GMS message to every registered device (the ones that sends their tokens).
You could get rid of the update button for good then, everything would be automatic.
Since GMS launches a Service on the devices, even if the app isn't running, you can make the Service download the new content then stop himself (without launching the main app at all...).
If the app can launch silently a download in the middle of the night, the user would have his new content already ready-to-listen when he woke up, on his way to work.
Every user would be up-to-date everytime they catches a connection.
This isn't even a battery consuming task, since Google Play checks GMS messages anyway.
The app can already download automatically at the time of your choice. The feature you’re asking requires that all the heavy lifting is done server side. Which means that the app won’t work anymore when the server crashes or is available. Plus for handling this kind of server charge it will cost me like thousands of dollars which I can’t afford. The server stores more than 100k podcasts feeds but much more of standard RSS feed which are usually updated multiple times a day. So in order to update feeds automatically server side I will need a lit of horsepower which cost a lot…