🎉 Svartifoss is now on Google Play
The easiest way to get Svartifoss just became one tap. It's in closed testing right now, completely free while that lasts:
- Join the Google Group with the Google account you use on your phone.
- Accept the test invitation and choose to become a tester — that page links straight to Google Play, where you install it on both your phone and your watch.
Going to the Play Store listing without accepting the invitation is why it would show the app as unavailable, so don't skip step 2.
Now, the biggest release Svartifoss has ever had.
A big visual refresh — customizing your watch feels new
- No more black windows. The Queue and the Lyrics screen used to be the two odd ones out — flat black, no matter what look you'd set up everywhere else. They now show your actual background, your artwork, your colours — exactly like the player and every panel already did. If you use "glass" style panels, this is the one that finally makes them look like glass instead of dark grey.
- Build your own background out of layers. The Background page used to give you three fixed slots in a fixed order. Now it's a list you build: add a wash, a shading, an accent glow — as many as eight — reorder them, duplicate them, remove them. Want two shadings at once, or a glow sitting above your artwork instead of under it? Now you can.
- Over 100 new looks for that background, shared between the player and the Volume/Progress/Quick-actions panels — treatments that used to exist only on one side now show up on both.
- Text, Color, Panel, Player and Background pages were redesigned from scratch. Instead of scrolling a long list of settings, you pick what you're editing — a face, an element, a surface — and only the controls that actually apply to it show up. Editing feels like using a small design tool now, not filling out a form.
- The colour picker got much friendlier. It now shows the hex code of whatever you picked (and lets you type or paste one in), and keeps a row of your most recently used colours right there, so reusing a colour across title, artist and mini buttons is one tap instead of hunting through the wheel again.
- Title and artist text can now be centered on the round screen properly, sized up to 300% larger, and finally reach every face — not just the ones someone remembered to wire up.
Community themes — a gallery of looks other people made
A new shopping-bag button next to search and help opens a gallery of watch looks published by other users, browsable with no account at all.
- Discover. Search, filter by layout, sort by newest or most liked, and install with one tap.
- Like anything, instantly, with no sign-in.
- Publish your own. Once you've built a look you're proud of, submit it for review (a quick Google sign-in, a name, done) and it can appear in the gallery for everyone.
- Every theme shows how many people installed it, alongside its likes, and you can attach a real photo of your own watch to your submission if you want.
- Track what happened to anything you submitted from My submissions, and take a theme back down whenever you want.
New faces for your watch
- Artist — a whole new look built around a picture of the performer instead of the album cover.
- Ribbon and Frame — two new curated looks: a timeline of covers around the current track, and a rounded card that takes its colour from the album art.
- Matejdro — a tribute to the very first version of this app's watch screen from 2017. It's hidden by default (it's a period piece, not a daily face), so if you don't see it in the face picker, look for it — or a theme built on it — in Community themes instead, where it's now available alongside Vinyl, Halo, Aurora, Eclipse and Spectrum.
More ways to make text your own
- Title and artist can now have a shadow, an outline, or a backdrop plate behind them — each in its own colour — so light text over a bright photo finally stays readable and looks intentional.
- A new text case control turns any title or artist into UPPERCASE, lowercase, or Title Case.
- 50 more fonts are bundled in, bringing the total to 138 typefaces to choose from.
Two new full screens: Volume and Progress
Assign them to any button or gesture like any other action. They stay open until you dismiss them, show your actual theme, and seeking got smarter too — drag the edge ring and a marker shows exactly where the track really is, and you can cancel a seek mid-drag just by pulling back to the centre.
45 languages
Burmese, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and Central Kurdish are new this release, and every other language got a big catch-up on screens that had fallen behind.
Also new: a searchable icon picker with 235 icons; five more streaming services recognized for one-tap shortcuts (12 total); and a handful of new developer diagnostics for troubleshooting sync issues.
Fixed
The one worth calling out: "Reset this layout" used to restore a look the app never actually shipped, permanently — there was no way back except reinstalling. It now genuinely resets to the real thing, and you can always get back to it. Also fixed: the "watch app is missing" dialog telling Play users to go find an APK on GitHub instead of just pointing them to the watch's own Play Store page; theme colours bleeding onto the wrong theme when switching layouts from the watch; text sent sideways landing under the bezel; and a long list of smaller polish fixes. Everything else — the full list — is in CHANGELOG.md.
Installing
This release has no APKs attached — get it from Google Play using the two steps at the top of this page. Already sideloading a previous version? You can keep using it for now, or join the closed test above to move to the Play edition.