AfterTouch (mobile)

A monochrome Flutter app for controlling Bose SoundTouch speakers over your local network. It talks directly to the speakers on the LAN — playback, volume, tone, presets, sources, recents, and DLNA library browsing all work without any Bose cloud service.

Not affiliated with Bose. "SoundTouch" and "Bose" are trademarks of Bose Corporation. This is an independent, community project. The name "SoundTouch" appears here only to describe the hardware and local protocol the app speaks to.

Features

• Discovery — finds speakers on the LAN via mDNS / DNS-SD, with an "Add by IP" fallback and a status panel that shows what the discovery layer is seeing. Known speakers are remembered between launches.
• Now Playing — artwork (rendered greyscale), track metadata, scrubber, transport controls, shuffle / repeat, docked volume and mute. Live updates over the speaker's WebSocket event stream, with HTTP polling as a fallback.
• Sound / EQ — probes each speaker and shows only the controls it actually supports: volume, bass, treble, balance. Writes are optimistic and debounced.
• Presets — 2×3 grid; tap to recall, long-press to replace with what's playing or to clear a slot.
• Recents — replay anything from the speaker's recently-played list.
• Sources — switch between Bluetooth, AUX, and any streaming sources the speaker exposes, with availability reasons surfaced inline.
• Library / DLNA — browse UPnP/DLNA media servers visible to the speaker, add or remove servers, walk folders, and play tracks. Runs entirely speaker-to-server; no companion service required.
• Radio catalog (optional) — when an AfterTouch service URL is configured in Settings, browse and search TuneIn and RadioBrowser through it and play results to a speaker, including "save as preset".
• Monochrome UI — an achromatic greyscale interface throughout; hierarchy and state come from weight, contrast, inversion, and motion rather than hue. System / Light / Dark themes.

Project layout

A Dart pub workspace (no melos):

aftertouch-mobile/
  pubspec.yaml                  workspace root
  packages/
    soundtouch_client/          pure-Dart client for the SoundTouch local API
  apps/
    aftertouch_app/             the Flutter app

packages/soundtouch_client

A pure-Dart (no Flutter) client for the SoundTouch local Web API:

• HTTP control on :8090 (XML on the wire)
• real-time events over the WebSocket "gabbo" channel on :8080
• UPnP / AVTransport on :8091
• mDNS device discovery

It has its own unit tests and two runnable examples:

# List SoundTouch speakers on the current network
dart run packages/soundtouch_client/example/discover.dart          # one pass
dart run packages/soundtouch_client/example/discover.dart --watch  # until Ctrl-C

# Dump a speaker's DLNA/library responses for troubleshooting
dart run packages/soundtouch_client/example/library_probe.dart <speaker-ip>

Requirements

• Flutter (stable), Dart SDK ≥ 3.12
• A device or simulator on the same LAN/VLAN as the speakers. Multicast must be allowed between the two — AP isolation, guest networks, and some mesh setups block mDNS; use "Add by IP" there.

Getting started

cd aftertouch-mobile
flutter pub get                       # resolves the whole workspace

dart analyze                          # lint the workspace
dart test  -C packages/soundtouch_client
flutter test apps/aftertouch_app

cd apps/aftertouch_app
flutter run -d <device>

Platform notes

• Android — needs INTERNET, ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE, ACCESS_WIFI_STATE, and CHANGE_WIFI_MULTICAST_STATE (all install-time, already in the manifest). No runtime location permission is required for discovery. Cleartext HTTP to the LAN is allowed via a network-security config.
• iOS — Info.plist declares Local Network usage, the Bonjour service types, and local-networking ATS. iOS shows a one-time "allow local network access" prompt on first discovery.

Upstream project

The protocol knowledge and the shape of packages/soundtouch_client come from the Bose SoundTouch Toolkit by Tobias Gesellchen — a Go library and set of tools that keep SoundTouch speakers usable after the Bose cloud shutdown:

• Repository: https://github.com/gesellix/bose-soundtouch
• Docs: https://gesellix.github.io/Bose-SoundTouch/
• License: MIT — Copyright (c) 2026 Tobias Gesellchen

packages/soundtouch_client is an independent Dart re-implementation of that project's pkg/client (HTTP + WebSocket + discovery). Endpoint behaviour, the "gabbo" event channel, the discovery approach, and the DLNA/STORED_MUSIC flow were all learned from that codebase and its documentation.

That project also runs a local cloud-replacement service called AfterTouch. This app is named to pair with it: the optional radio catalog talks to a running AfterTouch instance, and everything else works speaker-direct without one.

The Go project in turn credits earlier reverse-engineering work that this app also stands on — notably SoundCork (Deborah Kaplan et al.) and SoundTouch Plus (Todd Lucas), whose notes document much of the undocumented SoundTouch API.

License

Provided as-is, for interoperability with hardware you own. See the upstream project for the MIT-licensed Go implementation this client is derived from; if you redistribute soundtouch_client, carry that attribution with it.

Notes

I have used claude code to create requirements and develop the app.