docs(blog): add May – June 2026 narrative update post

Tells the story since v0.93.1 (rescue to platform): local music + TTS, robustness/security hardening, health diagnostics. Emphasises that the roadmap is community-driven, shouts out Sander ten Brinke's soundtouch-maui companion app, and sets out what v1.0.0 signals (stability, clean-slate re-migration, beyond-Bose value: #495, #508, #188). Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-18 00:26:29 +00:00 · 2026-06-28 17:44:20 +02:00
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+---
+title: "AfterTouch: From Rescue to Something Better, and the Road to 1.0"
+date: 2026-06-28
+description: "Since v0.93.1, AfterTouch grew from a cloud-shutdown rescue into a platform of its own: local music, voice prompts, sturdier internals, a growing community, and a 1.0 on the horizon."
+tags:
+  - discovery
+  - health
+  - migration
+  - fixes
+sidebar:
+  exclude: true
+---
+
+The launch post went out under the wire. Bose pulled the plug on the SoundTouch cloud on
+May 6, and **v0.93.1** was very much a rescue: get accounts migrated, keep radio and
+presets alive, stop perfectly good speakers from turning into bricks. The weeks since,
+up through **v0.117.0**, have been about a quieter shift: turning that rescue into
+something that stands on its own, and in a few places, something better than what Bose
+offered. And almost none of that direction came from me. I use my own speakers with a
+pretty narrow set of features; nearly everything below exists because someone in the
+community described a use case I'd never have thought to build.
+
+## Local music, back under your control, and a speaker that talks
+
+The clearest sign of that shift is local music. Your speakers always had a native
+local-music source for playing your own library off the network, but browsing it used to
+run through the Bose app. AfterTouch brings that back on its own terms: it discovers
+DLNA / UPnP media servers on your network and drives the speaker's native source
+directly. Browse folders in the **Library** tab or from the command line, queue a whole
+folder, and next/previous and auto-advance behave like a real playlist.
+
+Then there's something genuinely new: speakers can now *talk*. A text-to-speech feature
+announces arbitrary text out loud, with Google Cloud TTS as a pluggable provider you
+configure from the settings UI. It's built on the speaker's notification capability, but
+turning that into spoken prompts is the kind of thing that happens when the platform is
+open and nobody has to wait for a vendor to approve it.
+
+There is more in the same spirit, smaller but useful: service-side search across TuneIn
+and Radio Browser, a "Play URL" view for arbitrary streams, save-as-preset straight from
+Now Playing, and a step toward needing no extra hardware at all, an on-device SSH unlock
+flow that opens the door to running AfterTouch directly on the speaker.
+
+## The unglamorous half: earning trust
+
+Features are the easy part to write about. The work that actually mattered most was
+making AfterTouch dependable enough that you stop thinking about it. Speaker data is now
+written to disk durably, so a power cut mid-write no longer wipes your presets and
+accounts, and corrupt or empty files fall back to sane defaults instead of failing.
+Recent tracks stopped vanishing and duplicating. Internet radio got steadier: Radio
+Browser plays through its proper native source, TuneIn fails over across stream
+candidates, and a stray trailing slash in a server URL no longer breaks playback.
+Multi-room grouping handles member removal correctly.
+
+Under the surface, a sustained pass closed several request-forgery paths, swept the code
+for log-injection, validated identifiers on management endpoints, and removed a
+credential-logging shortcut. And the health checks grew teeth: server-URL reachability,
+CA-bundle integrity, a speaker-clock check with a one-click fix, and a DNS-path probe for
+the internet-radio escape problem, all now labelled with the device name and IP so you
+know exactly which speaker a warning is about.
+
+## A community, not a product
+
+The best thing to happen since launch isn't in the changelog. It's the people.
+
+It's worth saying plainly: this project is driven by its users. I personally use
+SoundTouch in a fairly simple way, and most of what shipped over these weeks (features
+and bug fixes alike) is the result of friendly, constructive feedback from people who use
+their speakers very differently than I do. The DLNA library, the voice prompts, the radio
+and grouping fixes, the migration edge cases: each one started as someone taking the time
+to explain a real-world setup and point at what was missing. That feedback is the
+roadmap. Keep it coming.
+
+A standout is **[Sander ten Brinke](https://x.com/sandertenbrinke)**, who is building
+**[soundtouch-maui](https://github.com/sander1095/soundtouch-maui)**, a cross-platform
+SoundTouch app designed to work hand in hand with AfterTouch. That's exactly the shape
+this project should take: not one tool trying to do everything, but independent pieces
+that fit together because they share an open, community-owned foundation. Go build a
+player, a remote, a home-automation bridge, whatever you need, and have it talk to a
+service you control.
+
+An honest admission: there has been more activity in issues and discussions than one
+maintainer can keep up with, and not every thread got the reply it deserved. But the
+encouraging part is that it increasingly doesn't have to. People are answering each
+other, sharing setups (the FRITZ!Box and AdGuard DNS notes came straight from a user's
+own working configuration), and debugging together. That's the project moving in the
+right direction. AfterTouch works best as a community, not a support desk.
+
+## The road to 1.0
+
+So what does **v1.0.0** mean? Mostly: stability. A version number that signals a proper,
+dependable base you can build on, with a management API that won't shift under you and a
+service that runs unprivileged and installs cleanly by default.
+
+A few things are on the list to get there. The admin and account-management UI works,
+but it feels rough at the edges, and that's the part you actually touch, so it deserves
+some polish. I also want to keep a publicly deployed, cloud-hosted service in mind:
+the moment AfterTouch is reachable from the open internet, it needs proper authentication
+and authorization, so a passing script kiddie can't read your recently played songs (or
+worse). And the docs need some love and a clearer structure. One feature is likely to land
+in this stretch too: making
+[presets propagate cleanly across the speakers in one account](https://github.com/gesellix/Bose-SoundTouch/issues/495),
+without the manual "refresh sources" dance. There's probably more before it's truly
+"1.0", but none of it is blocking: there's nothing preventing us from getting there *now*.
+
+It's also a natural moment for a clean slate. If your migration has accumulated quirks,
+1.0 is a good excuse to reset and re-migrate your speakers onto a known-good footing.
+
+And then the interesting part begins. With the rescue done and a stable base in place, the
+focus shifts to delivering value the old Bose cloud never could. Some of that is already
+taking shape in the issue tracker: an
+[audiobook mode](https://github.com/gesellix/Bose-SoundTouch/issues/508), and deeper
+integration with external music providers such as
+[Amazon Music](https://github.com/gesellix/Bose-SoundTouch/issues/188). A service under
+community control is a rare chance to actually solve the things people ask for, instead of
+waiting on a roadmap that was discontinued. If there's something you wish your speakers
+did, the [issue tracker](https://github.com/gesellix/Bose-SoundTouch/issues) and
+[Discussions](https://github.com/gesellix/Bose-SoundTouch/discussions) are where it starts.
+
+## Current release
+
+**v0.117.0**, released June 28, 2026
+
+This blog will be updated monthly, or whenever something significant ships.
+Subscribe to the [GitHub releases](https://github.com/gesellix/Bose-SoundTouch/releases)
+for individual version notes.