A small, e-ink-friendly TIDAL client for the Light Phone III.
Full-length streaming, monochrome UI, no clutter.
Kelp streams TIDAL through saved songs, albums, artists, playlists, daily mixes, and search in a text-first Light UI. The Light SDK owns the tool UI and navigation; a Kelp-owned Media3 media-session service owns background playback and publishes system transport controls. Full-length stream resolution uses the unofficial first-party-client technique used by phono, not the official TIDAL Player SDK.
You need a paid TIDAL subscription. Like phono, kelp never works around that and never will.
- Grab the latest APK from Releases.
- Enable USB debugging on your LP3 (developer options), then:
Keep
adb install -r path/to/kelp-vX.Y.Z-vcN.apk
-rwhen upgrading an existing Kelp install so Android replaces the app while preserving its data. A separate old Tide entry is not replaced because Tide used a different package ID. - Open Kelp and sign in. The login runs in two steps back-to-back with the same TIDAL account (one for the catalog, one for playback) — complete them both.
Kelp is sideload-only today. It can't go through Light's hosted tool builder, because the builder ignores companion modules and doesn't allowlist the TIDAL SDK — so the TIDAL code lives in a runtime-only server module inside the APK. If that ever changes upstream, this section changes first.
- Saved songs, albums, artists, playlists (your whole collection, paginated)
- Home mixes (daily / discovery / new-release) with artist subtext
- Full catalog search preserving TIDAL relevance order, with complete results and per-section paging
- Queue with shuffle, repeat, seek, and "keep playing similar songs" continuous playback
- Foreground-service playback outside Kelp, with track metadata and system play/pause/previous/next controls
- Full-width navigation and transport touch targets, with Now Playing accessible from the top-left waveform
- LOSSLESS streaming by default (falls back to lower quality if needed)
- Follows LightOS theming and hardware-button navigation
Loading audio is distinct from playing; preparation failures remain visible in Now Playing. Returning from playback keeps loaded browse results. Settings exposes continuous playback and sign-out, with read-only information about the actual streaming policy. Nonfunctional quality, normalization, explicit-filter, and offline controls are not presented as working features.
Background playback is not persistent playback recovery: force-stop, reboot, or process loss clears the in-memory queue. Leaving Kelp does not stop an active session; signing out does.
You'll need JDK 17, an Android SDK (platform 36), and the companion Light SDK checkout at ../light-sdk (branch codex/kelp-official-sdk, based on upstream v0.1.1 plus kelp's small compatibility patches):
./gradlew :app:assembleDebug
adb install -r app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apkFor release-quality builds (runs the tests, R8, signed, into dist/):
scripts/build-release.shYou'll also want your own TIDAL developer credentials in local.properties (see local.properties.example) if you're hacking rather than installing releases.
Local builds default to one worker, two JVM-visible processors, a 1.5 GiB heap, and in-process Kotlin compilation, following Lightious's low-resource build setup. The playback migration was built against adjacent SDK 52fbc5a8aedbd3c4c88037580709e53540086229; existing local SDK changes were preserved.
CI runs tests + assemble on every push; pushing a matching v* tag publishes a signed release automatically.
Unofficial project, unaffiliated with TIDAL or Light. A paid TIDAL subscription is required for everything to work. If TIDAL rotates their first-party client id (you'll notice as playback suddenly failing), the fix procedure is documented in docs/TIDAL_ARCHITECTURE.md.
- docs/TIDAL_ARCHITECTURE.md — why the two-sign-in model exists, stream resolution, API map
- docs/PRODUCT.md — product decisions
- AGENTS.md — repo map and rules for working on the codebase
Apache-2.0.