MovieBox Android

The native Android app for MovieBox — Jetpack Compose for the UI, Media3 for playback, and the shared Rust core engine behind a JNI bridge.

What it does

• Browse the MovieBox home deck, search the catalog and open any title
• Pick a source per resolution and play it with the headers the CDN needs
• Subtitles: pick a language, download the track and switch it inside the player
• Favourites, watch history and continue watching
• History that works the way you expect: playing resumes at the saved point, the resume button and continue-watching cards go straight into playback, and any entry can be removed
• A Flow-style player: double-tap the sides to seek (it stacks), the center to play/pause, hold for 2× speed, plus lock mode, a sleep timer, audio track picking and live subtitle timing
• Downloads: start a download from any source, watch it progress, pause, resume (the signed link is re-resolved when it expires), remove it, or open the finished file — the completed file is indexed so it shows up in a gallery

Install

Grab the latest APK from Releases (app-release.apk), enable Install unknown apps for your browser if Android asks, and open it. Preview builds are signed for sideloading.

Prefer building it yourself? See Build below.

Layout

android/                     the Gradle project (Compose + Media3)
crates/moviebox-android/    the JNI bridge (cdylib) onto the Rust core
docs/android.md              the bridge contract, the parity table and the build steps

The core is a git dependency

The app does not vendor the engine. It depends on the published crate from the MovieBox repository:

moviebox-tui = { git = "https://github.com/manish0467/MovieBox-Tui", tag = "v0.1.28", default-features = false }

Bump the tag when a new core release lands.

Build

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-21-openjdk
export ANDROID_HOME=$HOME/Android/Sdk

# 1. the Rust library
cargo ndk -t arm64-v8a -o android/app/src/main/jniLibs build --release -p moviebox-android
cargo ndk -t x86_64  -o android/app/src/main/jniLibs build --release -p moviebox-android

# 2. the APK
cd android && ./gradlew assembleDebug

adb install -r android/app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk

The Rust core is fetched by cargo from GitHub, so the first build needs network access to the MovieBox repository.

Licence

GPL-3.0-or-later. The app reuses interface patterns and some components from Flow (also GPL-3.0); see the headers of the files taken from it. The Rust core in MovieBox-Tui is MIT OR Apache-2.0 and is consumed as a dependency.