It has been a while since we talked about our official Android remote and to the outside all seemed quiet. Nothing is further from the truth. We are happy to announce that our official Kore remote is getting an update. Our developers SyncedSynapse and poisdeux have been putting a lot of work on including new features and improving what was already there. Additionally it’ s also great to see that developers from outside of the team are helping getting it better. Many thanks go out to them as well. This is what opensource is all about.

From seeing the number of Google Play downloads we can tell the community loves the Kore remote as well since it’s nearly at 780.000 active users. This is great news too see a lot of you are using it and makes the effort put in it extra worthwhile. Hopefully this with this new update the numbers of users will grow even more.

Upcoming version 2.1.0

• Add songs tab on Music section and Artist section and support for showing songs without album or artist

• Add add-on browsing has now been made easy as you can navigate the add-ons from your phone and start the videos

• Show artist details when an artist is selected from the list

• New option: pause playing when in a phone call (requires permission to phone state on Android versions < 6.0)

• New option: keep the remote above the lockscreen

• Support for playing Vimeo URLs

• Improve library syncing

• Various UI tweaks

• Bug fixes

There have been several language updates however if you language is missing feel free to submit it to our code repository and we’ll include it next time.

This update will be available to every one if it passes the check by our loyal tester who have subscribed to the Play Store alpha/beta testing program. So if you are not receiving the update yet just have a little patience and I’m sure it will be there soon.

UPDATE (19 July 2016):

As of today 2.1.0 has been released as final and should be available for update or installation. Should you wish to help us out on further testing and improving you can enter our beta program where you receive regular updates. Go here: Kore beta testing program. All your devices running Kore and logged under the same Play Store account will receive early updates. You can opt out any time you like of course. For regular downloads you can just go to the Play Store and find Kore.

For support and questions visit our forum.

Requirements

- Android 4.0.3

- Phone or a tablet

With Kore you can

– Control your media center with an easy to use remote;

– Including several colour themes;

– See what’s currently playing, including relevant information

(movies, TV shows, PVR, music, pictures and add-ons);

(movies, TV shows, PVR, music, pictures and add-ons); – Change, sync or download subtitles;

– Switch to the desired audio streams;

– All the usual playback and volume controls at your disposal;

– Toggle back and forth between windows or full screen playback in Kodi

– Add, check and manage the current playlist;

– View what is in your media library with details about your movies, TV shows, music and add-ons;

– Direct link to relevant IMDb website for extensive information;

– Library maintenance like clean and update;

– Wake-on-LAN and other power control actions that the selected device supports;

– Send YouTube videos to your currently selected media center;

– Send text to the instead of using the keyboard in Kodi

– Switch to live TV channels and trigger recording on your PVR/DVR setup;

Currently not added yet

– Browsing smartplaylists

These features will be added in future versions

Works with

– Kodi 14.x “Helix” and any higher;

– XBMC 12.x “Frodo” and 13.x Gotham;

Current supported interface languages

– Asturian

– Basque

– Brazilian

– Bulgarian

– Chinese

– Croatian

– Czech

– Dutch

– French

– German

– Italian

– Portuguese

– Portuguese (Brazil)

– Spanish

– Russian

More languages will follow in future releases. Don’t forget to rate the app while you’re downloading it.

License and development

Kore is fully Open-Source and released under the Apache License 2.0

Should you wish to help on future development you can do so by visiting https://github.com/xbmc/Kore for code contributions.

Need help or have any problems?

Please visit our forum at https://forum.kodi.tv/forumdisplay.php?fid=129

As of this moment, it is available from Play Store for you to install. As time passes and new features and languages are added, you will automatically received updates once you have it installed. For further support you can visit our dedicated forum.

Here are some screenshots showing it in action on a normal Android phone.