● Free & open source · sideload-only

Svartifoss

Control your music from your wrist.

Svartifoss reads whatever's playing on your phone — any app with a media session — and puts full control on your Wear OS watch: physical buttons, screen gestures, the digital crown, a quick-actions panel, a Tile, and a watch-face complication.

Download Svartifoss View source on GitHub
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Svartifoss now-playing screen on a Wear OS watch
How it works

Set it up on your phone.
It's on your watch instantly.

Every button, gesture, and screen is yours to assign from the phone app. The watch mirrors it over the local Wearable Data Layer — no cloud, no account, nothing leaves your two devices.

Picking an action to assign on the phone app
Assign on the phone
The assigned action shown as a mini button on the watch
Live on the watch
What you get

Every surface, configurable.

Nothing about Svartifoss is fixed. Pick what each input does, how the screen looks, and what shows up when nothing's bound to a button.

Now-playing screen

Album art, a drag-to-seek ring, and an optional rotary-crown scrub. Choose the classic edge-ring layout or the new Expressive face with Material 3 Expressive-styled controls.

Configurable input

Physical buttons, screen quadrants, swipe gestures, and up to three on-screen mini buttons — assign play/pause, skip, volume, shuffle, repeat, like, search, playlist shortcuts, Tasker tasks, or launching another app.

Quick-actions panel

Double-tap to open a secondary panel with round buttons for like, shuffle, repeat, and a shortcut straight into the queue.

Queue & history

Browse the app's real playback queue when it exposes one, or fall back to a locally tracked play-history list when it doesn't.

Glanceable surfaces

A Tile with track info and transport controls, a queue-preview Tile, and a watch-face complication showing the current album art.

Search & playlists

Voice or keyboard search against the playing app's library with a replayable history, plus named playlist shortcuts reachable straight from the watch.

Full action menu

A full-screen list for anything not bound to a button or gesture — nothing is ever more than one extra tap away.

Works with any player

Anything exposing a standard Android media session works out of the box. Extras like like/shuffle/repeat/search depend on what that app publishes.

Look & feel

Tuned from the phone, previewed live.

Screen themes, album-art styles, accent colors, and per-surface styling for the mini-buttons row, quick panel, and queue — all previewed on a live miniature before you commit.

Classic now-playing screen
Now playing
Edge seek ring with mini buttons
Edge seek ring
Mini buttons row
Mini buttons
Quick actions panel
Quick panel
Queue screen
Queue
Actions menu
Actions menu
Minimal screen theme
Minimal theme
Rotary crown seek overlay
Crown seek
Volume overlay
Volume overlay
The name

Black Falls

Svartifoss means "Black Falls" in Icelandic — named after the waterfall in Vatnajökull National Park, where dark basalt columns frame a narrow cascade. Like water over stone, music flows through the app.

Install

Sideload it. Takes a minute.

Svartifoss isn't on the Play Store — install the APKs directly from GitHub Releases onto your phone and watch.

Install on your phone

Download the phone APK below and open it. Android may ask you to allow installs from your browser first.

Install on your watch

Download the watch APK and sideload it to your Wear OS watch — easiest with Wear Installer .

Open both apps

They find each other automatically over the Wearable Data Layer — no account, no pairing code, nothing else to configure.

Phone · Android 6.0+ Download phone APK
Watch · Wear OS (API 26+) Download watch APK
Building from source? See the README.