● Free & open source · sideload-only

Svartifoss

The most customizable media controls on Wear OS

Svartifoss reads whatever's playing on your phone — any app with a media session — and puts full control on your watch: physical buttons, screen gestures, the digital crown, a quick-actions panel, a Tile, and a watch-face complication. Twenty watch faces, each one tunable down to its colors and shapes.

Download Svartifoss View source on GitHub
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Watch faces
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 account or Svartifoss server. Beyond your two devices, the app talks to GitHub for the optional update check and only when you explicitly open the Community themes gallery, to Firebase for diagnostics and occasional developer announcement notifications, and — only if you opt in — to the streaming service itself to fetch a saved shortcut's cover art. Crashlytics reports, announcement notifications, and shortcut artwork can all be switched off under Data & support → Privacy or Apps.

Assign on the phone
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, previous/play-pause/next and ±10-second seek controls, plus 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.

Faces

Twenty faces. Every one drawn from the art.

Immersive, Poster, Studio, Expressive, Classic and more — each face rebuilds its palette, gradients and progress from the cover that's playing, so the same watch looks like a different device track to track. Pick one per playing state and preview it live from the phone.

Immersive face, A Bad Dream by Keane
Immersive
A Bad Dream
Expressive face, Atlantic by Keane
Expressive
Atlantic
Poster face, Creep by Radiohead
Poster
Creep
Immersive face, Your Confession by hikota
Immersive
Your Confession
Poster face, Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana
Poster
Smells Like Teen Spirit
Poster face, Somewhere Only We Know by Keane
Poster
Somewhere Only We Know
Expressive face, Breaking the Habit by Linkin Park
Expressive
Breaking the Habit
Studio face, Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day
Studio
Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Studio face, Yellow by Coldplay
Studio
Yellow
Immersive face, Talking To Sirens by Thirteen Senses
Immersive
Talking To Sirens
Classic face, Decode by Paramore
Classic
Decode
Studio face, Side by Travis
Studio
Side
Expressive face, Invincible by Muse
Expressive
Invincible
Immersive face, Uprising by Muse
Immersive
Uprising
Studio face with an Up Next pill
Studio
i was only temporary
Possibilities

Every overlay is its own wardrobe.

Volume, seek, the quick-actions panel and the queue each carry a full catalog of styles — a sample of each is below. Mix and match them freely; none of it is tied to whichever face is running underneath.

Volume6 of the readout styles
Volume overlay: thin arc ring
Ring
Volume overlay: dotted arc with pill readout
Dotted
Volume overlay: dark minimal arc
Minimal
Volume overlay: horizontal pill bar
Pill bar
Volume overlay: glass ring
Glass
Volume overlay: warm album-toned ring
Album tone
Seekscrub & progress
Seek overlay: clock-dial ticks
Clock dial
Seek overlay: linear scrub bar over album art
Linear
Seek overlay: dotted ring with pill readout
Dotted
Seek overlay: thin AMOLED ring
Thin ring
Seek overlay: album-toned dotted ring
Album dots
Seek overlay: warm minimal ring
Album tone
Quick paneldouble-tap actions
Quick panel: round icon slots with an Up Next row
Round slots
Quick panel: warm round slots
Album tint
Quick panel: two-slot compact layout
Compact
Quick panel: state-aware toggle slot
State-aware
Quick panel: labelled full-width rows
Labelled rows
Quick panel: album-tinted labelled rows
Album rows
Queueup-next & history
Queue: album-tinted rows with cover thumbnails
Cover rows
Queue: AMOLED rows with selected highlight
AMOLED
Queue: tonal gradient cards
Tonal cards
Queue: full cover-photo rows
Photo rows
Queue: gold tonal cards
Gold cards
Queue: album-tinted rows
Album tint
Depth

Not a coat of paint — every surface, really tunable.

Save a look as a named theme and switch between them in one tap, or browse a public Community themes gallery and make an installed copy your own. Every gallery miniature is rendered on your phone from the theme data against a built-in sample track. Seek and volume readouts alone ship over a dozen styles; queue, mini buttons, and color treatment each get their own catalog, not a single toggle pretending to be one.

Watch themes library on the phone, with a Create theme button
Named themes, one tap to switch
Watch color treatment picker with live color swatches
Color treatment, previewed as swatches
Long list of seek and volume readout styles
A dozen+ seek & volume styles
Long list of queue styles
A dozen+ queue styles
Mini buttons shape picker
Pill, circle, squircle, leaf, drop…
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. And you only do it by hand once: from 2.2 on, the phone app notifies you about new releases (pre-releases opt-in) and can send the watch its update over Bluetooth — no more cables or Wear Installer.

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 2 or newer (3, 4, 5…) Download watch APK
Building from source? See the README.