3.5

Release details

Application

Octave

Bundle ID

streaming.octave.dev

Release date

August 6, 2026

Platform

iOS

Architecture

Unknown

Minimum OS

18.0

File size

Unknown size

Artifact

Verified · available

This release is about the Home Screen widgets, which had quietly become the worst-looking part of Octave. All six have been rebuilt. The previous versions drew their own black background and tinted it with the current album's accent colour, so every widget was the same muddy maroon regardless of what was playing. Worse, they used the system's semantic secondary text colour on top of it — and that colour is computed for the system's background, not one an app paints itself, so artist names, section headers and timestamps were rendering at nearly the same brightness as the surface behind them. They are now built on the standard iOS widget material and nothing else. The semantic colours are correct by construction, light mode works, and on iOS 26 the system renders the widgets as Liquid Glass and applies the tinted and clear Home Screen treatments without Octave doing anything. Album artwork is the only colour left in a widget, and it deliberately stays full colour even in tinted mode, because a desaturated album cover is unrecognisable. The list widgets also spread their rows across the full height instead of bunching them under the header and leaving a dead band at the bottom. Now Playing picked up the circular and inline Lock Screen sizes, so it can be a progress ring or a one-line status as well as the rectangular card. Separately, a long-standing artwork bug is fixed: when the catalogue retires a cover it does not return an error, it redirects to a blank grey disc and serves it as a valid image, so Octave showed that disc as if it were the album art. Retired covers are now detected and replaced with Octave's own placeholder, in the app and in the widgets alike.

Screenshots