Svartifoss 3.1 is about reaching things without picking up your phone — changing the face from your wrist, scrolling past the first twenty tracks, finding a setting by name — and about shortcuts that actually start playing.
Three new watch faces
- Chat — the listening session as a message thread. Each track arrives as a pair of bubbles, and the one playing sits at the bottom as a wide voice message, cover as the sender's picture, waveform filling as the track plays.
- Split — a Wear OS notification card: cover on top, a panel in the album's own colour below, the playing app's icon as a badge on the seam. The text colour is worked out from the panel behind it, so it stays readable whichever colour the album lands on.
- Note — as stripped back as it goes. A black screen, a small round cover, and one centred line reading
Artist: Track.
That makes sixteen faces in total.
Reach it from the watch
- Change the watch face from the watch. Long-press the centre of the now-playing screen and pick another one — your own saved themes included. Swiping right closes the picker back to the player. It's a three-way choice under Settings → Behaviour (change face / open the queue / nothing).
- The queue goes past 20 tracks. A "Load more" row appears whenever the phone is holding tracks it hasn't sent, fetching another 20 at a time.
Find a setting by name
Around 190 settings across twelve pages meant remembering which page held one. The magnifier in the toolbar searches both tabs by name, shows which page each result is on, and takes you there scrolled to it. Accents and capitals are ignored, so "reproducao" finds "Reprodução".
Colour
- Use one colour instead of a palette, under any colour treatment.
- Choose which colour of a cover becomes the theme colour — the boldest one, or the one that actually covers the most of the artwork.
- The colour harmonies now visibly differ on the watch, rather than computing a palette nothing drew.
Shortcuts that play
- A shortcut picked on the watch no longer opens the music app on your phone first. The phone tries every silent route — the direct command, then the background one that works with the screen off — and only opens something if all of them fail. A phone in your pocket now stays dark when the quiet route works.
- A playlist an app won't play by address is played by name instead, and Svartifoss now checks that playback really started rather than trusting the app's word for it.
- Search, library browsing and background playback now work with apps built on the current media library (Media3). One missing lookup was costing four features on those apps.
- A one-tap action for your SoundCloud likes, alongside the YouTube Music and Spotify ones.
Íslenska
Fitting, since Svartifoss is named after the waterfall — the app is now fully translated for the language of the place it borrowed its name from, on both the phone and the watch. That's fourteen languages.
Fixed
Twenty-five fixes, including: the watch clock showing the previous song's colour; a crash on track change with the album-art fade on; the app failing to open with "Multiple observers registered"; tapping a queue track not playing it; app icons rendering at album-cover size; the playing app's icon blinking out on every track change; "Force stop" leaving its notification behind; and the queue passing recently-played tracks off as the upcoming queue. The full list is in CHANGELOG.md.
Installing
Both APKs are sideloaded and must be installed together — they share a signing key and package name, and that's what lets them talk to each other.
mobile-release.apk— the phone app.wear-release.apk— the watch app, installed via Wear Installer or ADB. Once the phone is on 3.1, Settings → Updates can push it to the watch over Bluetooth for you.
If you're on 3.1-beta1 or 3.1-beta2: install mobile-release.apk manually this once. Those builds compare versions in a way that reads "3.1-beta2" and "3.1" as the same version, so the in-app updater won't offer it to you. After that one manual install the updater works normally, including the watch push.