Gramophone

Gramophone plays the music files on your phone and nothing else. Its README calls it “A sane music player built with media3 and the Material Design library that is following Android’s standard strictly.” AkaneTan started it in 2023; it is now maintained by nift4 under the FoedusProgramme organization on GitHub, and keeps its original package name. Version 1.1.0 in July 2026 was the first release in over a year, adding playlist editing, favourites, word-synced lyrics, ReplayGain, playback speed and a pure-black theme, and 1.1.1 and 1.1.2 followed with bug fixes.

What it does

• Your library from Android’s media index, browsable by album, artist, folder or the file system, with natural sorting. It plays MP3, FLAC, Ogg, Opus, M4A, MKA and WAV, according to the project, using the phone’s own decoders.
• Lyrics, synced by line or by word for karaoke-style display, from LRC, TTML or SRT files or from the file’s tags; there is also a lyrics widget for the home screen.
• ReplayGain 2.0, off by default. Switched on, it evens out loudness per track, per album, or “Smart”, which “automatically preserves album dynamics only when playing songs from an album consecutively”, and it uses dynamic range compression to avoid clipping.
• Playlists as files: M3U, XSPF, WPL and PLS are read and written, and new playlists are M3U files in your Music folder, so other apps can use them too. Favourites are one such playlist.
• A queue, sleep timer, playback speed, and support for the system’s or other apps’ equalizers.

Not there yet, judging by open requests: multiple artists or genres per song, CUE sheets, Subsonic or other network libraries, and Android Auto, which is prepared in the code but switched off.

What goes online

Nothing. The app declares no internet permission and even removes the network-state permission its playback library would add, with the comment “we don’t network playback”. There are no analytics or crash-reporting libraries. When it crashes, it shows the log and offers to copy, share or e-mail it; the e-mail is prepared in your own mail app, where you decide whether to send it. Its privacy policy: “No data is transmitted to the Service Provider by the application.”

Permissions, and what asks for what

It asks for access to your audio files when you start it. Two others are declared but not requested: photo access, which the app says is entirely optional and only used to load cover images stored as separate files, and Nearby devices, which, if you grant it in Android’s settings, lets it read which codec your Bluetooth headphones use.

About this file

• This is the developer’s own build of version 1.1.2, byte for byte the APK on the project’s GitHub release, which F-Droid and IzzyOnDroid distribute unchanged. Its certificate is the one the README lists for GitHub, F-Droid and IzzyOnDroid, so this copy and theirs update one another; the certificate’s name field is just “0”.
• The 12.5 MB file runs on Android 5.0 and later, on ARM and x86, 32- and 64-bit, and declares 12 permissions: reading audio, writing storage on Android 10 and older for playlists, the optional photo access, Bluetooth, notifications, and running playback in the background. The 1.1.0 release notes warn that support for Android 5.x will end soon.
• Gramophone is licensed under the GPL-3.0 or later, as its source files and F-Droid say; IzzyOnDroid lists GPL-3.0-only. It plays through the maintainer’s own fork of Google’s Media3 player library and includes a small ALAC decoder under a BSD-style licence.
• The screenshots, from the project, date from 2024 and show the interface before 1.1.0’s redesign of lyrics and the queue.

CPU types in this build: arm64-v8a (64-bit ARM, almost every phone since 2017); armeabi-v7a (32-bit ARM, older and budget phones); x86 (32-bit Intel, emulators); x86_64 (64-bit Intel, emulators and Chromebooks).

Versions currently kept in the IzzyOnDroid repository. We host and check only the newest one. Full changelog.