Thanks for your feedback and I’m glad that the bridge devices are working well for you. They were very popular and helped many people make music online during the pandemic.
We have no immediate plans to end support for bridge devices. We’re continuing to ensure compatibility with Virtual Studio and if something breaks, we will fix it. But we are also a very small team and at this point the amount of effort we can dedicate to bridge devices is almost zero.
During the pandemic, people were willing to spend money to buy an extra device. But as in-person restrictions vanished, so did the market demand. I believe the bridge devices continue to be a great option if you don’t already own a compatible computer, but otherwise it’s far easier to just download and install JackTrip’s Desktop app for free.
As to how many people fall into one category versus the other, I think the market data speaks loudest. JackTrip Bridge device sales plummeted as Covid restrictions ended, while the desktop app adoption skyrocketed. This trend wasn’t unique to JackTrip; both of our (ex)competitors who sold hardware devices have since exited the market.
Somewhere in Pennsylvania lies a storage locker full of parts for building bridge devices. We put the breaks on manufacturing and selling them, but I wouldn’t completely rule out a return someday. Other factors involved like Chipaggedon have since subsided (Raspberry pis are becoming more readily available again). But we’d have to see a large enough demand for devices to start that back up again, and all the data I see is pointing in the opposite direction.
Mobile is a different story altogether. I completely agree that more people nowadays have a mobile device versus a computer, and we should support that better. We took one (small) step in that direction by making JackTrip accessible via web browser (including on mobile), but that still has latency challenges due to the way web browsers work. While mobile device hardware hasn’t been practical to date for low-latency collaboration, that is changing…
First, we have adoption of USB-C and increasing availability of good audio interfaces that you can plug into mobile phones and tablets. More and more new audio interfaces being introduced today claim compatibility with iOS (sorry, Android users) You can also connect these up to docks with Ethernet, making them quite viable from a hardware perspective.
The next bright light on the horizon comes from Wi-Fi 7. While previous iterations of Wi-Fi technology have been unusable for low-latency collaboration, this new standard promises for the first time to (finally) address latency and connection stability. While you can’t yet buy devices with support for Wi-Fi 7, they are likely to start coming to market later in 2024. For the first time ever, I could envision an iPhone or iPad being released in the Fall that is fully capable of running something like JackTrip and performing well.