Svartifoss 4.1 is about the moments that used to feel wrong — skipping a track, pressing a button on a phone that has been locked for a while, getting a playlist onto the watch — plus an Expressive face that answers your finger, a double pinch anyone can now try, and a watch app that finally installs on its own from Google Play.
A track change that feels like one motion
- No more flicker through "Stopped". Skipping used to show the player stopping first — "Stopped" on the artist line, the play/pause control flipping, the cover blanking — before your track appeared (YouTube Music does it around every skip). The watch now shows the next or previous track's title, artist and cover the moment you press, from the queue it already holds; the phone's real answer replaces it when it arrives, and if it never does, what was held back is shown after all.
- The cover is already sharp. The phone sends the neighbouring tracks' covers ahead of time at full watch resolution, so a skip draws the final picture instead of a pixelated thumbnail that snaps sharp later. Off with shuffle on.
- Title and artist change over instead of jumping. On every face the old text leaves to the left and the next track's arrives from the right, inside its own band.
- Covers settle in. The incoming cover arrives slightly oversized and settles while it fades over the old one, drifting in from the right — or the left when you pressed Previous. Split, Note, Chat, Metadata, Ribbon, Frame and Depth used to swap outright; every face now shares one transition. The first cover after opening the app fades up too, instead of landing ahead of the controls.
- A long scrolling title dissolves at both ends instead of being cut in half, and no longer stops after three loops.
The always-on display is left out of all of this on purpose: it draws no motion.
Expressive answers your finger
The three transport controls behave as one group: press one and it widens while its neighbour squeezes by exactly that much, instead of the whole row shrinking away. It springs back on release, and a quick tap gets the same gesture as a held press. The play and pause marks turn and grow into one another (on Expressive and Material), and Expressive's scalloped button and ring turn slowly anti-clockwise while a track plays, holding still when it pauses.
The watch controls a phone that has been locked for a while
Once the watch app had closed, the next press had to restart the phone's side, which Android refuses after the phone has been locked a while — so the press was dropped while the watch had already drawn it. The phone's side now stays up while music plays, and when a command genuinely can't run, the watch says Unlock your phone to control playback.
Music onto the watch
- Add to watch menu, in one step. Paste a playlist, album or track link and the sheet shows its service and kind, looks up its name (Spotify, YouTube Music, SoundCloud and Deezer publish one; for the rest you type it), and one tap saves it to Streaming shortcuts and puts it on the menu. The lookup is a network request, so it runs by itself only with Fetch shortcut names and artwork online on, and otherwise waits for a tap on Get name from link.
- Pick action is one page. Six categories that each opened a page are now one scrolling list in sections, with chips to jump between them and sub-lists that open in place; search still finds everything. The Actions tab also stops offering what does nothing.
Double pinch is open to everyone, marked Beta
No more Show archived options. It works three ways: the watch's own detector on Pixel Watches that support it, Mobvoi's pinch sensor on TicWatches, and an experimental detector you calibrate yourself on any other watch with motion sensors. It's Beta because recognition isn't yet dependable everywhere. Calibration was reworked so a real double pinch can be recognised, with a round-screen layout and a live graph of the sensor, and reopening the player (or, with the experimental detector, tapping the screen) no longer triggers it by accident.
More new
- A corner tap flashes the icon of the action it ran, on every face (Flash icon on tap, on unless you had already chosen otherwise).
- Synced lyrics with per-word timing (rarer than line-level sync) colour in word by word, on the Lyrics screen and the Verse face.
- The quick actions panel opens with a short fade-and-settle instead of appearing all at once.
- Five more cover shapes — Leaf, Drop, Arch, Pebble and Shield — with Hidden now in the same picker on Note and Metadata.
- The Player and Mini buttons settings are grouped by subject, with every description back.
- The two Wear OS Tiles show up as Now playing and Shortcuts in the system picker, each with its own icon.
- Settings → Developer reports which Wear OS your watch runs: below Wear OS 5 the always-on player can be replaced by the watch face after a while, and nothing in the app can prevent that.
Fixed
- The watch app could not be installed from Google Play. It was declared non-standalone, so Play didn't list it on the watch and modern Wear OS no longer pushes it there: an account without the app in its Play library had no route to the watch at all. It now installs on its own (the phone app is still required).
- Repeat cycles again and Shuffle can be switched on from the watch. Repeat once shows its numbered icon, and the two actions that shared its name are now Set repeat: off / all / one track and Set shuffle: on / off — what you had assigned keeps working (English labels for now).
- The Like button reaches players it used to ignore.
- Expressive no longer shows a black screen when nothing is playing.
- The Breakcore look no longer switches unrelated songs to the Special Elite font.
- Crashes when editing an action on desktop-mode phones, when opening a watch screen after a long idle, and when sending watch logs on Wear OS 5 and newer; and no more false error reports from an older watch app paired with an updated phone.
Full list 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. Update the watch as well as the phone: skip prediction, the Unlock your phone message and the pinch calibration all live on the watch.
mobile-release.apk— the phone app.wear-release.apk— the watch app, installed via Wear Installer or ADB. Once the phone is on 4.1, Settings → Updates can push it to the watch over Bluetooth for you.
Installed from Google Play? Don't install these over it: the Play copy is signed with a different key, so neither channel can update the other and a phone from one won't pair with a watch from the other. To switch, export a config backup, uninstall on the phone and the watch, and install both from the new source.