Audible for Windows Phone is certainly possible, so where is it?

Audible?

I similar experimenting and tinkering with software. A lot similar how a circuit bender tries to get electronics to emit beautiful music, I attempt to coerce software into doing things it wasn't designed to do. Often, like my recent Windows Phone Hackathon, I fail spectacularly. But rarely, I exercise make notable progress. Cue Aural.

Aural.com (Aural for short) is a service endemic by Amazon that provides digital audio books. They put out software that works across a slew of devices such as the iPod, Kindle Fire, Blackberry, and even PC. Old hats may even recall that Audible supported Windows Mobile 5 devices such every bit the HP iPAQ Pocket PC. One platform void of support, notwithstanding, is Windows Telephone.

Nosotros – along with our readers – have been keeping the pressure level on Audible for quite some time now, to no avail. Support technicians would say an app is in the works but has no ETA. Now they're saying this month. Who knows when this is really coming out? More importantly, what's taking so long?

I sat down one day and decided to figure out why this was taking and then long, or at to the lowest degree try. I started by downloading the sometime Windows Mobile five software. In the dusty CAB were a number of skins and resources, to back up the fragmented Windows Mobile market place, along with some key awarding files. Disassembling the Audible Player executable revealed they all relied on a single dynamic link library (DLL) to perform all the needed functions: AAXSDKWin.dll.

AAXSDKWin.dll is a library compiled for devices containing a StrongARM processor, like the iPAQ mentioned earlier. Without going too deep, it was compiled using an pedagogy fix (ARM4i) that is still used in today's ARM (e.g. Cortex) processors. At this bespeak, y'all're probably thinking "Hey… doesn't Windows Phone sit on top of ARM too?" Yep, it sure does.

I took the library and started weeks of disassembly, study, and boozing, excruciatingly dissecting scrap after scrap until I had enough of their APIs worked out to use the damn matter in a proof of concept. I jiggered it into a Silverlight for Windows Phone application projection and deployed information technology onto my Samsung Focus exam phone. I was able successfully parse an Aural volume and light upward my UI with relevant metadata (east.g. title, writer, etc.). I remember thinking "Holy crap, it worked." (The app shot below is not a functional awarding.)

Audible for Windows Phone (concept)

How Audible for Windows Phone could expect like.

I continued my inquiry efforts, with the goal of playing a book in mind, but stopped brusque for two reasons: One, Audible's books are protected with a DRM scheme. This meant I needed to opposite engineer their account activation, authentication, and decryption logic – something I wasn't neat on doing. Ii, we reported that Audible was warming upward for a belatedly March release. I had no intention of busting hump to later be superseded by a better and official application. But with the success of the concept application, I couldn't answer the original question – What's taking Audible so long to put out an app?

I tin can simply surmise as to why. Nosotros know getting legitimate native access on Windows Phone is piece of cake and possible. I also know that all the APIs they demand are there. So from a technical perspective, an Audible app is possible. But perhaps Amazon, in a motility to increase Kindle involvement, decided to not continue porting Audible to newer mobile devices. Or maybe there's some behind-the-scenes political or logistical clashing we're non privy to. Or more probable, Aural merely didn't have the Windows Phone market numbers to justify paying a squad to rework their ancient source code into something usable on Windows Phone.

Regardless, an Aural awarding official or otherwise is coming.