Jellyfin for Android TV

Jellyfin for Android TV is the Jellyfin project’s official client for Android TV, Nvidia Shield and Amazon Fire TV. It is built around a ten-foot interface and remote control, not a touch-first phone layout. It needs a Jellyfin server you or someone you trust already operates.

From that server it can browse and play films, series, music and photos. Live TV and recorded programmes are available when the server has the required tuner, guide data or service configured. The client cannot add those sources on its own.

Playback and TV integration

The source contains Jellyfin’s internal players and an external-player activity. Server-side transcoding remains available when the television cannot decode a stream directly. Actual direct-play support therefore depends on the TV hardware, Android version, audio equipment and the media codecs—not only on the app.

The manifest declares TV guide read/write permissions for Android TV home-screen channel rows and Watch Next, audio recording for voice search through Android’s SpeechRecognizer, and boot/background permissions that let WorkManager restore an hourly channel task after restart. It also permits clear-text traffic, which matters when a Jellyfin server is reached over plain HTTP on a local network. For remote access, expose the server through HTTPS rather than sending credentials over unencrypted internet traffic.

Android’s voice-search permission does not mean that Jellyfin records continuously. The fixed manifest describes it as search voice-to-text and marks the microphone hardware optional. As with any app using a home server, the client sends account, library and playback requests to the server address you configure.

The package includes the ACRA crash-reporting library. After a crash it automatically sends the stack trace, device model, Android version and, by default, logcat to a client-log endpoint constructed from the last used Jellyfin server address and authenticated with the session token; the explanatory prompt comes afterwards. Reporting and log inclusion both start enabled and have separate switches. If you use someone else’s server, its administrator can receive these reports.

TV app versus the phone app

The separate Jellyfin phone app is better for a handset, downloads and Android Auto. This version is for a couch-and-remote workflow. Installing one does not replace or update the other because their package names differ.

The three screenshots are Jellyfin’s Android TV store graphics. They show the TV layout; the precise library art and available rows depend on the connected server and user account.

About this file

Version 0.19.10, build 191099, is the developer’s own GPL-2.0-or-later release APK. F-Droid rebuilds it from source, confirms that the result matches and publishes the same developer-signed file; the F-Droid and upstream copies can update one another. The 22.0 MB APK runs on Android 5.0 and later and includes native libraries for 32- and 64-bit ARM and x86 devices. Its SHA-256 is 8510a517c99927076082917f41bf306dd7a2546c59d492dd11bde18d6e2e4628, matching F-Droid’s signed index and the upstream release.

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 F-Droid repository. We host and check only the newest one. Full changelog.