Svartifoss 4.2 turns the watch's quick actions panel into something you build yourself, adds a sleep timer, gives every saved playlist its own screen with Play and Shuffle, lets you choose which app opens a streaming link, and spends noticeably less of the battery while music plays.
Svartifoss is now on Google Play. One listing installs the phone app and the watch app and keeps both updated; it is a paid app, with a single purchase covering both devices. The APKs on this page stay free, built from the same code.
Build your quick actions panel
The panel that opens when you double-tap the centre of the watch is no longer one fixed composition. It is a list of blocks you choose, order and tune — from Edit panel content under Watch → Panels → Quick actions, or from the Quick panel row on the Controls and Actions tabs, with a miniature of the watch beside the list and a line marking where the first screen ends. Hold and drag a block to move it; tap it to adjust it, to say whether it shows always, only while playing or only while nothing is, or to remove it (with Undo).
- Track, Round buttons (yours, or the playing app's own) and Up Next.
- Volume: lower and raise by 5, 10 or 20 %, holding to repeat, with a bar between the two buttons that shows the level.
- Skip and position: the time played on the left of a progress bar and the track's length on the right, with back and forward arrows for 5, 10 or 30 seconds — the same glyphs the music apps use.
- Tools: playback speed (cycles through the presets and shows the current one, and now keeps climbing when you press it several times in a row), the new sleep timer, lyrics, the queue, the volume and progress screens, the face picker, voice search and the menu.
- Favorites: the actions you star with the lightning bolt on the Actions tab, as a grid of covers or as rows.
- All actions: every action as a row, or one All actions pill that opens the full menu.
Every block made of several controls sits on one pill, the same surface as the Up Next pill, so it reads against any album and any style. Until you change anything, the panel is exactly the one you had.
A sleep timer
The new Sleep tool pauses the music after a while, for falling asleep to it. One press cycles off, 15, 30, 45 and 60 minutes, and the chip shows how many are left in the panel's active colour. The phone keeps the timer — it is what pauses the music — so it still ends if the watch has dropped out of range or closed its app.
A playlist opens with its cover, Play and Shuffle
Choosing a saved link from the shortcut list, the Shortcuts Tile, the actions menu or the quick panel now opens its own screen first, the way the music apps on the watch open a playlist: the cover (blurred behind it too), the name, the service and kind, Play beside Shuffle, and Open on phone below — all in the cover's colours.
- Shuffle works on every service, not only YouTube Music: any music app whose player accepts a shuffle request can be shuffled from here. Play always plays in order, so one Shuffle no longer makes the next Play shuffle too. Shuffle is offered for playlists, albums and artists; a single track, an episode or a radio-style mix gets Play alone and starts immediately.
- Play or Shuffle is chosen on the watch, so the link editor no longer asks for "Play shuffled" when you save a link, and you no longer need a second, shuffled copy of a playlist in the menu. A YouTube Music link already saved shuffled keeps shuffling.
- Prefer the one-tap start? Turn off Play or Shuffle on the watch (Settings → Apps → Streaming shortcuts, on by default). Buttons and gestures assigned to one link still start it at once either way.
Choose which app opens a link
A saved streaming link can now open in the app you prefer — for example, a YouTube Music link in a customised build like Morphe instead of whichever app Android picks. The picker only offers apps that actually support that link, and Open on phone follows your choice, including after an app is uninstalled.
Covers and lists
- Liked songs and similar collections get covers of their own — YouTube Music's Liked Music, Spotify's Liked Songs, SoundCloud's Likes and Deezer's Flow, drawn on the phone so they need no connection — instead of a bare thumbs-up, and a saved link without a cover is drawn in its service's colour. The action picker and the Add to watch menu sheet show the same covers.
- With Fetch shortcut names and artwork online on, a shortcut can also explain what it opens: its public creator or channel and description.
- The watch's lists now open with a heading — a small icon in the colour of the album playing, over the list's name — and the menu takes a faint wash of the album's colour at the top. A list with nothing in it shows its message in the middle of the screen instead of a row that looked tappable.
- The icon picker lists the coloured icons of the streaming apps installed on the phone, found in the background so the picker never waits for them.
- The queue now starts a few tracks before the one playing, instead of sending up to two hundred tracks you had already heard.
Also new
- Hide from recent apps (Settings → Automation) keeps the watch app out of the watch's recents list. Off unless you turn it on.
- The quick-panel editor, its blocks and tools, the sleep timer and the other strings added with them are now translated in all 45 languages, and some wordings were corrected — for instance the label shown while playback is paused, which several languages rendered as "Stopped".
- Google Play build only: an optional Support the developer tip, sold through Google Play Billing, which unlocks nothing. This GitHub build keeps its Buy Me a Coffee and Ko-fi links.
The watch and the music app agree on what is playing
- Changes you make in the music app on the phone now reach the watch while a track plays — a seek, a like, the playback speed, shuffle or repeat — instead of waiting for something unrelated.
- Skipping forward or back by seconds moves the watch's clock and ring at once, and going back no longer restarts a live stream, because the jump is measured from where playback actually is. Buttons and menu entries you already set to skip pick this up by themselves the first time the phone app runs after the update.
- Opening the watch app mid-song no longer shows 0:00 with music apps that only report their position when something happens.
- Streaming shortcuts no longer confuse an old song or an old request with the one just picked.
Lighter on the battery and the phone
- Music playing costs the watch much less battery: the progress ring and bar redraw only when the change is visible, about a quarter as often, and the watch no longer checks the position or prepares neighbouring covers when no screen that shows them is open.
- Changing track costs far less on both devices; the queue is no longer rebuilt and sent several times for every track.
- The phone no longer keeps its mini player working in the background, and no longer re-reads the cover and repaints the app on every tick. The service that talks to the watch signs up for volume changes once per run instead of piling up.
- Oversized streaming covers no longer need to be decoded at their original resolution, which keeps memory use bounded.
- The clocks on the watch change on the minute, and scrolling the queue and menu in the Cover blur style is smooth again.
- Logging is lighter on both devices, and the support log keeps the lines that explain a problem.
Fixed
- The watch app no longer crashes when the phone drops out of range at the moment you use it — picking a queue or menu entry, loading more, or pressing play, pause or skip on the system media controls.
- A list or cover the watch cannot read no longer replaces the player with an error screen, and a problem reading the watch's saved queue no longer stops it connecting to the phone.
- Reopening the watch app just as it closes no longer leaves it unresponsive, and closing it on the Verse face now lets the phone stop too.
- Streaming covers with black bars fill the Quick Panel and the shortcut screen correctly, while a square sleeve designed with a frame is left alone.
- A shortcut without its own cover follows the active watch accent, and the blank cover uses the music-queue icon.
Full list in CHANGELOG.md.
Installing
Google Play: open the listing and install; Play delivers the watch app and the updates.
GitHub (free APKs): 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: the quick panel's blocks, the sleep timer and the playlist screens 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 4.2, Settings → Updates can push it to the watch over Bluetooth for you.
Installed from Google Play? Don't install these over it: pick one source for both devices, because the two editions can't update each other and a phone from one