NicotinD TV 0.8.119

NicotinD TV is the Android TV client for a self-hosted NicotinD music server. You run the server on your own machine; this app sits on the TV home row and streams your library to the living room. There is no NicotinD account, no cloud service, and nothing to sign up for — the only server the app talks to is the one whose address you give it.

You will need a NicotinD server before this app is useful. It runs in one Docker container on anything from a spare laptop to a NAS.

Built for a remote, not a touchscreen

This is a separate app from the phone client, not the same screens stretched out. It ships a ten-foot player, D-pad navigation throughout, and predictable Back behaviour, and it registers a channel on the Android TV home screen.

What it does

* Browses and streams your library — artists, albums, songs, genres, with cover art sized for across-the-room viewing.
* Metadata-driven radio that picks what comes next from BPM, musical key, genre and mood similarity rather than from a recommendation service.
* Synced lyrics with a karaoke-style vocal-mute option — the reason a lot of people want music on a TV in the first place.
* Plays in the background with system media controls, and accepts playback started from another NicotinD device.
* Multi-user, with per-user settings on one shared library.

Privacy

The app talks to your server and nothing else. No analytics, no advertising identifiers, no third-party SDKs. Your listening history lives in your own database.

Connecting it

TVs have no camera, so you connect the way TV apps always have: type your server's address, or enter the pairing code your server displays. This is not a limitation of this build — it is the only path on any TV.

About this build

This is the same APK the project publishes on its GitHub releases — one build, no F-Droid-only variant, and no proprietary library of any kind.

Installed from F-Droid, it updates through F-Droid, and its own in-app update button hides itself. That button exists for people who sideload, where it is the only way to update; the app asks Android who installed it and removes the control when a store did. This is why it declares the "install unknown apps" permission even though F-Droid will never use it here.

The TV app is a separate package from the phone app, so the two install side by side rather than replacing each other. If you sideloaded a TV APK before version 0.7, that older one used the phone package name and will not be upgraded by this — uninstall it by hand.

Free software

NicotinD is licensed under the AGPL-3.0. Source, issues and documentation: [link removed]

License: AGPL-3.0-only