DABplay+

A car-friendly DAB+ radio app for Android head units, driving a cheap USB DAB+ dongle directly. Big tiles, big text, few taps: made to be used while driving.

Download: the APK is on the Releases page; what changed in each version is in the changelog. Website: jvspier.github.io/dabplayplus.

Google Play: DABplay+ is in a closed test before it goes public, and Google wants 12 testers for 14 days. Want to help? Join the tester group, then open the test page with the same Google account, tap "Become a tester" and install it from Play. No dongle needed: without one you can still open every screen.

Now playing (night)	Now playing (day)
Stations (day)	Side-panel layout (day)

Features

• Favourites grid: eight large tiles on one screen, up to 24, reorder by long-press and drag.
• Now playing: "Artist – Title" from the broadcast (DLS / DL Plus), and the station's slideshow (cover cards, shown whole, never cropped) or its logo, standing on a soft reflection.
• Station logos, downloaded automatically when online (RadioDNS, then the station's website, then radio-browser.info) and cached; Settings shows how many were found, with Retry missing and Refresh all. Offline, everything else still works.
• DAB+ and DAB (MP2) stations; DAB uses the app's own MPEG Layer II decoder.
• Reception handling: live signal bars, "No signal" while in a tunnel, resumes by itself. Short errors become a brief mute instead of a stutter.
• Follow station: when the signal is gone, switches to the same station on another multiplex, using what the broadcast announces about itself.
• Traffic announcements (optional, off by default): switches to traffic news on the same multiplex and back, with a banner and Skip; a "TA" badge shows when the station takes part.
• Plays nicely in the car: silent during phone calls, quieter under navigation prompts; steering-wheel buttons through a proper media session; auto-resume of the last station; Back never leaves the radio by accident.
• Start with the car (optional, off by default): opens DABplay+ when the car starts; off, it stays out of the way of CarPlay / Android Auto even though the dongle is always connected.
• Two layouts (player bar or side panel), day/night theme, controls on the driver's side (left or right), full screen or next to the head unit's own bars.
• Backgrounds: four tints for the page behind everything (Dusk, Ocean, Ember, Aurora), each with a day and a night version, plus an optional Pure black at night for driving in the dark. Tiles, text and icons stay the same.

Hardware

• Android 8 (API 26) and up, landscape. Designed on a 1280×720 head unit; also fits phones in landscape, smaller head units (1024×600) and larger screens.
• A USB DAB+ dongle from the list below.

Supported dongles

Dongle	USB ID	Status
wRadio C100 / DTR-100 / "DAB+ Receiver for Android Navigation" (single antenna), sold under many brands. Confirmed by users: CAMECHO, and sticks that name themselves [email protected] or [email protected] (the last one plays since 1.3.6)	16c0:05dc	Tested
C100 "Dual Antenna" (YHX)	16c0:05dc, same	Untested (protocol)
Si4684 module: Eonon A503, XFA-DAB220	1a86:5537	Untested (protocol). The module decodes by itself: no traffic announcements, and service following is the module's own
Siano SMS2160 "Rhine800" / Denver TDMB	187f:0800, 187f:0700, 187f:0802	Untested (protocol)
Siano SMS2270 "Rio"	187f:0600	Not supported: needs vendor firmware we can't distribute

About "untested": only the first dongle has been tested on real hardware. Support for the others is written from public sources and from how other apps talk to them, with automated tests against that description, but nobody has run it with the real dongle yet. It may work, partly work or not work at all. If you have one of these dongles, please send a dongle report and say how it went, with the file from Settings → Diagnostics log (Save or Share; it lists the USB devices and what the app did, no song titles), and this table gets updated. Other dongle families are catalogued in docs/dongles.md.

Status

Released (the changelog has the latest version), in a closed test on Google Play (see above). In daily use in a car on a Dudu3 head unit (Android 10, budget-class hardware) with the DTR-100 dongle: quick and responsive, and through a tunnel it shows "No signal" and is back quickly after it. Before that it was tested with the same dongle in the Android emulator (USB passthrough): scan, playback, switching, text, slides, logos, reception loss and recovery, dongle dropouts. The app is tuned for budget head units (one cached background layer, a baseline profile, decoding that costs well under 1 % of a core).

Not yet verified on air: MP2 (the Netherlands has no MP2 stations; tested against reference files), a real traffic announcement switch, and following a station to another multiplex while driving (both are covered by tests against a simulated tuner). Other dongles: see the table above.

Roadmap

• RTL-SDR sticks (RTL2832U): these don't decode DAB themselves, so the app would have to demodulate the signal on the head unit. A big project of its own, planned for later (docs/dongles.md).

Building

Needs JDK 25 and the Android SDK:

cd android
echo "sdk.dir=$HOME/Android/Sdk" > local.properties      # your SDK path
./gradlew test assembleRelease

See android/README.md for the emulator setup with USB passthrough.

Documentation

• docs/architecture.md: modules, driver interface, playback.
• docs/protocol.md: the DTR-100's USB protocol; protocol-c100-highlevel.md, protocol-si4684.md and protocol-siano.md for the other dongles.
• docs/findings.md: hardware findings and the test log.
• docs/design-notes.md: UI decisions.
• tools/: the Python proof of concept, the reference implementation.

The dongle protocol was reverse engineered for interoperability. This repository contains no vendor apps or binaries. Station names and logos shown belong to their broadcasters.

Licence

MIT. Third-party parts keep their own licences: the Inter font (SIL Open Font License, android/app/src/main/assets/licenses/Inter-OFL.txt), Phosphor icons (MIT), OkHttp and AndroidX/Media3 (Apache 2.0), dnsjava (BSD).