Development builds

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Introduction

Development Builds are the next major version of Kodi. They are newer than the current stable release version, but are highly experimental and commonly contain bugs, breakages and experimental features. Some features may have been intentionally disabled while testing is in progress, while other features may have broken as a result of a new experimental feature. The developers use these builds as testing grounds to gauge the feasibility and reliability of future features to be incorporated into Kodi.

Development Builds should not be confused with the nightlies of the current stable version which are simply bug fixes and are, in most cases, safe to use.

This page deals with Development Builds, and not any releases pertaining to the current stable version.

The current stable release is: Kodi v20.5 Nexus
The current development build is: Kodi v21 Omega


Warnings

THESE BUILDS ARE OFTEN UNSTABLE and for users that do not fear bugs or occasional crashes. They are used to help us in testing for the future release. If you want a stable HTPC then please install a current stable release.

ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR SETTINGS WHEN USING THESE BUILDS

Kodi nightlies for MacOS will need at least 10.13 as the minimum OS version.

If you are using a Windows nightly build please also download the .pdb file with the same version from our mirrors, rename it to Kodi.pdb and place it alongside the Kodi.exe inside the installation folder. Re-download the correct file each time you are installing another nightly build. This helps us to identify possible crashes.

Bugs
As development builds are bleeding edge code you might find a bug here and there. In order to rectify these bugs, it is important that these are reported: HOW-TO:Submit a bug report.
Feature requests
If you have a feature that you think should be added to appear in the next stable version of Kodi, you can make a feature request: in the Kodi forum here.


Build Types

The following are the types of build releases you may encounter


Nightly builds

Nightly Builds are made on a daily basis and contain the most recent changes. They are also the most unstable of the development builds, until "feature freeze" where only bug fixes are made.

Make sure you always download and run the most recent builds which can be found here... http://mirrors.kodi.tv/nightlies/


Beta and Release Candidate Builds

Beta
As Kodi approaches stable release, public betas will be released. These are similar to nightlies and monthlies in that they still contain bugs, but are more stable and are encouraged to be tried out. At the point where Kodi reaches beta, most known bugs have been fixed, and developers are now looking for bugs they might not know about.
Release candidate
When Kodi beta reaches the point where it seems ready for a final release a "Release Candidate", or "RC", is released to flesh out any final bugs which may become apparent as more and more users upgrade to this version. Depending on any issues found, there may be multiple release candidates.
Final release
After release candidates comes a final stable build that becomes Kodi v21 Omega stable release.
In some cases there are additional bugfix releases even after "final", but even those bugfix releases go through their own mini-cycle of testing and are recognised by increasing point version, eg vXX.1, vXX.2 etc.


See also


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