I know that OSMC can do a lot themselves and doesn’t depend much on the “interest” in Kodi. Sometimes a smaller community is even better than a large one with many newcomers.
But maybe interest in Kodi isn’t just shrinking, maybe it’s dying. Keep in mind that trying to support and maintain a project based on a “dead” open source project can be like fighting an uphill battle.
Maybe i’m beeing too pessimistic here but above graph has me worried to say at least.
Related side question: How is OSMC Android support coming along? Anything planned there for the foreseeable future?
Any piece of computer software that generally works OK and has a dedicated support channel will show a decline in Google searches after a time.
If there are few problems, people don’t search for it, and if there is a dedicated support forum, then people with problems will know to go there directly.
Do the same search for “Photoshop” and you’ll see it declines in a very similar manner, yet no one would possible say it is “dead”.
dying is hard word, since users often have the attention span of a goldfish they often tend to switch when a new popular thing is out and the hardcore users stay behind i doubt that the team will have a challenge with facing the future.
And the devs of Kodi are working hard to include new and exciting features that will meet the demands
I don’t think a reduction in people searching for Kodi is a very good indicator of a user base or general interest. I think that kind of graph is probably much better suited to judge the popularity of a meme or news story, than how many people are using a particular software. I’m sure there has been a decline since the peak of the “fully loaded” boxes as well as with the increased popularity of streaming services, but I don’t see there being much of a decline in its core users anytime soon.
It was all fun and games when only Netflix was around but today there are so many streaming services you’d have to pay a three-digit sum to watch all of them. Streaming became the new cable TV.
People were willing to pay for easy and legal access to one, maybe even a second service like Amazon, but when the thirteenth streaming company emerged, they rediscovered other means.
It’s a shame all these companies isolate themselves like Netflix did when Kodi asked about integrating their service into Kodi. They put tons of DRM into their stuff that only annoys paying customers and gets bypassed a day after it’s introduced.
Indeed – there are a large number of streaming services and this fragmentation will only fuel piracy further.
Spotify solved this for music and a lot of people gave up downloading for the convenience of just paying a small fee. I don’t think that will happen with all of the competing interests in video however; and Spotify is already having problems where artists are stating that they are not getting a lot per stream.
Indeed, the timely amount of a search strings in Google’s search engine does not correlate to the amount of things in reality. Take the word “corona” and the related Google statistic
We all know that virus is spreading more and more worldwide.
What ppl search for and what system they are using is very different.
Take a look at Microsoft, if the graph showed actual usage it would have had a different graph since there are over 1.5 billion devices running Windows (and even more if including Microsoft Office which is available on most plattforms).
You can absolutely extrapolate the popularity of Microsoft operating systems based on search trends. Also browsers, etc. I know that Google Trends is not equal to usage but its a good indicator of popularity trends.
I know everything is fine now, but IF Kodi development is slowing down sometime in the future and active developers are leaving the project behind, OSMC would be affected by that directly.
Leaving the project behind for what? Do you suppose these people are no longer interested in playing their own content or do you suppose there is some other software that provides similar function they would be switching over to?
Alternatives to Kodi currently available for managing your own libraries are Plex, Emby, Jellyfin, Streamio and Infuse.
And they are pretty attractive if you ask me. While Vero is absolutely still my “gold standard” device for video playback, i’ve switched to Infuse with an Emby library as a backend for day-to-day use.
I maybe wrong but my gut feeling tells me that Kodi maybe has a problem with keeping up with the times.
I think i brought my point across. I love my Vero 4k and love the community here even more, don’t get me wrong.
I’m just rambling along here and i hope i’m wrong and Kodi keeps going strong for the foreseeable future.
Indeed. Out of that list I believe the only open source project is jellyfin and a server backend with a detached client has never been a path that Kodi seems to have been particularly interested in. Wasn’t Plex a fork of Kodi to provide this function, Emby a replacement for Plex, and Jellyfin an open source replacement for Emby? Seems there is a lot more competition in that space to be worried about. An actual alternative would be something like MediaPortal but that is not exactly new software and its Google trends peaked out over a decade ago. Fun fact, despite the waning search hits MediaPortal is still around and being developed as well.
@ OP, did you check github recently? 89 active pull requests, 68 merged just in the last 30 days?
Doesn’t look like a dying project to me. Definitely though the project is maturing and changes are paced and incremental, this is clearly visible in the commit history below, for the last 1.5 years.
Which for us users, is just great.
