gabrielluizone/Svartifoss 4.3

Svartifoss 4.3 - New looks for volume, progress and the queue, lyrics in the quick panel, and buttons that work with a locked phone

on GitHub

Svartifoss 4.3 gives the watch's volume, progress ring and queue new ways to look, puts the line being sung in the quick panel, adds an always-on display that dims at night and a sleep timer that waits for the end of the track, lets you pick the play and pause drawings, and fixes the watch's buttons doing nothing while the phone is locked.

Svartifoss is 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.

Volume and progress, drawn your way

• Two volume bars that move. Wave swings further the louder it gets and keeps travelling along the bar while the panel is up; Ruler is a scale of ticks that fills with the level. Both follow whichever layout you pick.
• Two new volume layouts. Pillar is a slim vertical column; Basalt is seven hexagonal columns of uneven height that light up from the quiet end, each with a fine outline so the unlit ones still stand out. Volume thickness (50 to 180 %) sets the stroke's weight.
• Crown vibration on volume (off, every 5 %, or every 5 % and at the limits), right under Haptic feedback: a short tick at each step and a firmer buzz when the crown keeps turning at the minimum or maximum, which a crown with no mechanical click never told you.
• Progress ring styles. Wave is a swinging line that travels along the ring while music plays; Track minutes cuts the ring into one piece per minute, so the ring itself says how long the song is (a plain ring when the length is unknown, as on a live stream); Hex cells is a ring of small hexagons. New Top arc and Bottom arc layouts put the ring along one edge, Ring thickness (thin to bold) works on any style, and the Progress panel gets a Wave layout for its timeline.

The queue, reshaped

• Shape and colours are separate choices now. Queue style sets colours and effects; Pill shape (capsule, rounded, soft corners, square, leaf, speech bubble, hexagon) and Cover shape (rounded, square, squircle, circle, superellipse, leaf, drop, arch, pebble, shield) sit right under it. Both start on Follow queue style, so nothing changes until you pick one, and both are saved per face and travel in themes. Cover Square leaves the list because it is now Cover with Soft corners.
• Route strings every track's cover on one line through the list, like stations: the stretch already played in the album's colour, the track playing held in a soft capsule. Two more row styles, Basalt and Strata.
• Dim played tracks fades what already played, and the header reads Track 3 of 47, counted in the whole queue on the phone.
• Hold a row to Add this track to shortcuts, when the player published a shareable link for it.

Choose the play and pause icons

Expressive, Material, Vinyl, Poster, Studio, Halo, Aurora, Eclipse, Spectrum, and the tap confirmation of Frame and Ribbon had one fixed drawing each. Watch → Player → Controls now has Play icon and Pause icon, five drawings for each, picked separately and shown as pictures. Follow face keeps the drawing each face was designed with, so nothing changes until you choose; the choice is saved per face and travels with a theme.

An always-on display that dims at night

Night dimming lowers the AOD's brightness by the hour (22:00 to 07:00 at half brightness, or dusk to dawn, 19:00 to 08:00, at three-fifths), and Burn-in shift (gentle, standard, wide) sets how far the screen moves between refreshes. Two new styles draw a screen of their own in pure black: Minute ring, a hair-thin ring cut into one piece per minute of the track with the clock and title inside, and Basalt frame, a hexagon drawn around the clock and title, brighter behind the playback position so it is also the progress bar.

Lyrics, sleep and speed

• Lyrics in the quick panel. A block shows the current and the next line of the synced lyrics, and tapping it opens the full lyrics screen. It asks the phone for lyrics only while it is on screen.
• Sleep timer: Track end. After 60 minutes, the sleep chip now offers Track end: the music pauses a moment before the song ends, and a skip in the middle simply moves it to the new track. A live stream pauses when it changes.
• Playback speed in tenths, up to 3×. Hold the speed pill (or the quick panel's speed tool) for a fine control you can turn with the crown; a tap still steps through the usual quarters.

Buttons that work with a locked phone

Play/pause, next, previous and volume on the watch used to do nothing until you unlocked the phone, when the music had been paused a while, even though the watch drew the skip as if it had worked: Android 12 and later will not let an app start its background service from a locked phone, and that service was the only thing that could carry the press out. These commands now go straight to the music app's media session, from the watch's own controls, the volume, the Tile and any button or gesture you assigned to Play, Pause, Play/pause, Next or Previous. What still needs the service (queue, search, shortcuts, seeking, the quick panel) still does, and still tells the watch to ask you to unlock the phone. And when a player refuses a skip or a seek (an advert, a free tier's limit), the watch now says "App isn't allowing skips right now" instead of showing a skip that never happened.

Covers when a player publishes none

A YouTube video or live publishes only a title and a channel name, so the watch showed a black screen on any face that draws the cover. The phone now asks YouTube's Data API for the video's own thumbnail (sending the channel and title, with the key included in the app or one you paste under YouTube Data API key; used only when both match word for word) and, failing that, looks for the album in Deezer (again only on a match). With no match, the usual answer for a live, the screen stays dark. Online artwork turns both lookups off, a YouTube thumbnail is kept at most 28 days, and the privacy policy describes both requests. A live stream also says LIVE where the track time would be.

Also new

• Symfonium can be controlled from the watch: hold a song in search results to add it to Symfonium's queue, and the action picker offers a provider sync and songs, playlists, albums, artists, genres, mixes and radio, to play now, next or append, with resume and shuffle, through Symfonium's documented remote API.
• Audio output on phone (under Volume in Pick action) opens the phone's own list of where it plays, so the output can be changed from the watch.
• A Play and pause complication (a tap toggles without opening anything, with the elapsed time and the progress for faces that show them) and a third Tile, Recently played.
• The volume readout says why the phone might not be heard: a Do Not Disturb or mute symbol replaces the percentage while the phone's Do Not Disturb silences media or its media volume is off, and a small "blocked" symbol shows while the phone holds headphone volume at the hearing-safety level.
• Launcher icons, Google Play build only: Solid colour, Gradient, Cream and Charcoal Feather, picked in Settings → Appearance with pictures of the phone's and the watch's icon beside each name. One setting changes both icons, and the watch's launch screen opens with the one you picked. On Android 13 and later every Svartifoss icon, this build's included, now carries the monochrome layer that themed icons repaint.
• A rating card, Google Play build only: after the app has been opened on three different days, Google's own review card may appear (at most three times, at least 60 days apart). Svartifoss is never told what you rated.

Changed

• Both apps are leaner. Release builds are now fully optimized: the phone's code is about a third smaller (12.7 to 8.2 MB) and the watch's half the size (8.7 to 4.4 MB) next to 4.2, and pictures are always decoded at the size they are drawn.
• The Google Play edition needs Android 7.0 (it was 6.0). These APKs still install on Android 6.0.
• A playlist's screen on the watch is rebuilt around its cover: the clock and the name, the service line, Shuffle and Play as round buttons and an Open on phone pill with the app's own mark, with the cover as the backdrop. YouTube Music's Liked Music uses the cover that ships with the app and no longer depends on a setting, and the liked-songs actions are named after the collection (Liked Music, Liked Songs, Liked tracks, Flow).
• Smaller: the watch app opens with its round launcher icon on black, as Wear OS asks of a branded launch; the media Tile offers to resume when nothing is playing; the volume panel's buttons sit further from the bezel; the playing row in the queue loses its side bar; the Panels editor names each row and lists the newer options near the top; the drawer drops its Sync paragraph and says "libre", not "gratis", in every translation.

Fixed

• Tapping the button on the watch's "install the phone app" screen no longer closes the watch app, and that screen and the first-run lesson are no longer cut off on a small round watch.
• Track time past an hour reads 4:00:00, not 240:00, on every face and screen that shows it.
• Skipping or going back by seconds on a live stream no longer restarts it.
• The artist line shows the active player's name, such as Symfonium or YouTube Music, when a player omits the artist.
• The app-icon cover shape is now a true superellipse and is called Superellipse in all 45 languages, and the phone's preview of the queue draws what the watch draws, covers included.

Full list on the changelog page.

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, because they share a signing key and package name and that is what lets them talk to each other. Update the watch as well as the phone: most of 4.3 lives on the watch.

• mobile-release.apk is the phone app.
• wear-release.apk is the watch app, installed via Wear Installer or ADB. Once the phone is on 4.3, 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. The two editions are signed with different keys, so they cannot update each other, and a phone from one source will not pair with a watch from the other. To switch, export a backup in Settings, uninstall the app on the phone and on the watch, then install both from the new source.