Introduction

Kodi Assist is a remote control for the Kodi Media Center. In case you’re unaware, Kodi is an awesome home theatre server. It can organize your media, fetch artwork, track your progress, and much more. Kodi can turn your old (or current) computer into a complete home theatre. However, using this home theater with a keyboard and mouse can get a tad bit troublesome. This is where Kodi Assist steps in.

Features

Remote Control

First and foremost, Kodi Assist is a remote control. It has all the functions of a traditional remote control. In addition to traditional playback and navigation controls, Kodi Assist also has convenient volume and playback seek sliders.

Media Browser

Kodi Assist has fully functional media browser. Not only it lets you browse your entire media library on your phone, it also shows watch progress on TV shows and movies. It puts your favorite in-progress shows front and center so that you can easily pick up where you left off.

Live Tiles

Why bother opening the app when you can jump straight to your content? Kodi Assist lets you pin your media straight to the Home screen. While at it, it also users the rich media artwork so that your home screen always looks beautiful!

Success Story

Kodi Assist is, by far, one of my most successful mobile apps across all platforms. It breached 100K download milestone in a few months. Considering small user base of Windows Phone, it is quite remarkable.

It was critical success as well. It won The Best Windows Phone 8.1 App award in Microsoft //publish/ contest in 2014. Kodi Assist topped the charts in Lifestyle and Entertainment category multiple times. Owing to its success, the app got professional design uplift from Anagh Sharma.

Kodi Assist had to overcome a lot of engineering challenges. Since the app communicates with the server over WiFi, latency was an issue. Remote control requires instant feedback. So, latency was a strict no-no. Lot of micro-optimizations went into providing a great user experience.

While the Windows Phone OS isn’t around today to run the app, it greatly influenced the modern user experience design. I’m really glad that Kodi Assist was part of such an important milestone.