[rmk1139]

I recently developed my first addons for XBMC. The whole experience was wonderful. XBMC is a great platform for which to develop. It allows for great flexibility and easy delivery of content.

However, from this developer's standpoint, there is one glaring weakness with XBMC's addon system. I have no idea how my addon is being received, whether anyone else is using it, what native languages are using the addon, or even if the dang thing works at all outside of my house.

Enter, my new idea. What if we had an app store for XBMC? We sort of do already, with the repository system, but a true app store would have more features. Don't get me wrong. Everything should remain free and open source, so no credit cards, but I envision a system that will track the addons you've installed, sync addons between XBMC installs (settings too if the user desires), rate addons, report bugs, and comment on addons you've tried. My initial thought was to start off by leaving the XBMC interface as is and making most of these advanced features web based. So you would visit a website and manage your installed addons from there. This could allow you to go to the webpage, log in, and install an addon onto any of your XBMC boxes. It could even be made such that you can setup the addon from the webpage and push your settings to your XBMC boxes.

The biggest advantage, in my eyes, would be that you could install XBMC on a new box and have it sync to the cloud to download all of your usual settings and addons.

I was going to start working on a system like this, but I wanted to get some feedback first. What does everyone think about this? Good idea? Waste of time? What kind of enhancement features would you like to see to the addon system? A lot? None at all? Lets talk about it.

[davilla]

as soon as you permit those troublesome addons like icecast, you paint an big MPAA bullseye on whoever is hosting this.

[rmk1139]

I would suggest that the same addon requirements that exist now are maintained. Although, I do believe there is an Icecast addon. Has XBMC had trouble with this in the past with their repository?

[davilla]

we ban discussion of them here, what does that tell you
EDIT: sorry, not icecast, icefilms. icecast is a radio streaming service that's in the official repo

[Martijn]

we ban discussion of them here, what does that tell you

Think you got a little confusing with Icefilms (which is the baddy here).

We already thought about having some sort app store and if you look back in featured section you'll see you're not the first

[Ned Scott]

Actually, a lot of these ideas are going to be put into place. It's been discussed before on the forums, but real work is being done behind the scenes to bring a nice web "showcase" for add-ons. Eventually we want users to be able to review/rank/report issues, all that good stuff. There's just a lot of logistics to figure out in getting it working.

I really like the idea of being able to install add-ons from the web. Even if it was simply a local browser plug-in that handled it, that alone would make it more user friendly to install add-ons from unofficial repos, or no repo at all but just the add-on directly. Having a plug-in or a service to install the add-on to multiple boxes would also be very cool.

[rmk1139]

That's encouraging to know that something is already in the works. I was thinking something like a full Google Play store as far as pushing apps to boxes would go. A simple service script that accepted push style notifications would allow actions like these. This all, of course, requires a robust web server to host to the millions of XBMC boxes out there.

How serious is the current development on this? If it is more of a side project currently, I might try my hand at it, but I don't want to step on anyone's toes.

[Ned Scott]

When Frodo final gets released you'll be able to see where we're at :)