Retro Music

Retro Music Player is a music player by Hemanth Savarala and contributors, for music stored on your phone. Its README calls it a “Material You Design Music Player for Android music lovers” and is clear about the limits: it “doesn’t support music downloading or online music streaming.” After a long gap between 2023 and late 2024, it is maintained again; version 7.0, in August 2026, made all the former Pro features free.

What it does

• 17 now-playing screens to choose from, plus themes, Material You colours on Android 12 and later, and a home screen with recently played and most played music.
• Crossfade of up to 12 seconds, off by default.
• Sleep timer, which can finish the current song before stopping; on Android 12 and later it needs permission to set exact alarms.
• Tag editor for titles, artists and album art, plus playlists, a queue and folders.
• Lyrics, including synced ones, read only from your files: lyrics embedded in the song, an .lrc file next to it, or one in a RetroMusic/lyrics folder. The search button just opens a Google search in your browser.
• Android Auto support. For apps not installed from Google Play, Android Auto has to be told to allow them, through its “Unknown sources” developer setting.

There is no built-in equalizer: the equalizer button opens your phone’s audio effects, if it has any.

What goes online

Retro Music plays local files, but it fetches information about them. From the 7.0.3 code:

• Artist pictures come from Deezer: the app sends the artist’s name to api.deezer.com and downloads the image. Artist biographies come from Last.fm. Both follow the “Auto-download artist images” setting: Always, Only on Wi-Fi or Never.
• In F-Droid’s build that setting shows Never as its default, but until you open the Images settings page once, the code treats the setting as unset and falls back to Only on Wi-Fi. On a fresh install, then, artist pictures and biographies are fetched on Wi-Fi. Opening that page saves Never; we read this from the code and haven’t checked it on a device.
• Album pages ask Last.fm for album information, sending the album and artist name, every time you open one, whatever that setting says.
• No analytics, crash reporting or update checks. After a crash it shows an error screen, and the log is shared only if you choose to. F-Droid flags the app NonFreeNet because it connects to Last.fm.

It also announces the song that is playing to other apps on the phone, which lets a separate scrobbling app log what you listen to; Retro Music doesn’t scrobble itself.

The permissions it asks for

Eighteen. The less obvious ones: modify system settings for setting a song as your ringtone, exact alarms for the sleep timer, Bluetooth for starting playback when headphones connect, vibration for one of the player styles, and disable the screen lock and full-screen notifications for its optional lock-screen player, which is off by default. Internet is for the artist and album information above.

About this file

• This is F-Droid’s build of version 7.0.3, compiled from the source and signed with F-Droid’s key. It is the FOSS flavour, without Google’s Cast library.
• Google Play has the same package name, with more than 5 million downloads; we can’t check its key, so we can’t say whether it installs over this file. The GitHub releases are signed with throwaway debug keys (see the questions), and IzzyOnDroid doesn’t carry Retro Music.
• The 9.0 MB file runs on Android 7.0 and later and has no native code, so it works on any processor. Our scan found no trackers.
• Retro Music is licensed under the GPL-3.0. The screenshots in the project’s listings show commercial album covers and song lyrics, so this page has none.

Flagged by F-Droid:

• NonFreeNet: Relies on or promotes a proprietary network service.

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