UWP version Kodi may be discontinued due to lack of developers

The viability of the UWP version of Kodi is at stake. The version, which can run on Windows 10 and the Xbox One, requires specialist development skills that the Kodi development team does not currently have in-house.

In a blog post, the volunteer Kodi development team says it has exposed “a lack of experience and perhaps even interest” in this branch of Windows development since its move to Python3, which came into effect with version 19. Since the Kodi team doesn’t want to let the timing of the releases of its different versions diverge, the UWP version of Kodi should come out on time, if at all.

The Kodi team is looking for developers who can create applications in C++ for UWP and for the classic desktop version of Windows. Specifically, they require knowledge of CMake and the UWP API, but the blog post also has a more extensive attachment with technical details. Given the lack of this knowledge within the team, a candidate must be ‘independent and have enough experience’, as the rest of the team can only provide support and no real guidance.

Kodi is media center software that has a ’10-foot ui’, an interface so large that it can be easily seen from the usual distance between a TV and a couch. Kodi started out on the original Xbox in 2002, under the name Xbox Media Center, or XBMC. As the software expanded to Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Linux and more over the years, it was rebranded as Kodi in 2014. Plex is a fork of XBMC, dating from 2008.