Kelp

A small, e-ink-friendly TIDAL client for the Light Phone III.
Full-length streaming, monochrome UI, no clutter.

What is it?

Kelp streams TIDAL the way you actually use it — your saved songs, albums, artists, playlists, daily mixes, and search — squeezed into a calm, text-first interface that fits a minimal phone. Under the hood it runs the Light SDK and plays real, full-length tracks through its own Media3/ExoPlayer pipeline, using the same proven technique as phono and the other community clients (orpheusdl, streamrip).

You need a paid TIDAL subscription. Like phono, kelp never works around that and never will.

Install

1. Grab the latest APK from Releases.
2. Enable USB debugging on your LP3 (developer options), then:

   adb install -r path/to/kelp-vX.Y.Z-vcN.apk

   Keep -r when 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.
3. 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.

Features

• Saved songs, albums, artists, playlists (your whole collection, paginated)
• Home mixes (daily / discovery / new-release) + recently played
• Full catalog search with per-section paging
• Queue with shuffle, repeat, seek, and "keep playing similar songs" continuous playback
• LOSSLESS streaming by default (falls back to lower quality if needed)
• Follows LightOS theming and hardware-button navigation

Build it yourself

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.apk

For release-quality builds (runs the tests, R8, signed, into dist/):

scripts/build-release.sh

You'll also want your own TIDAL developer credentials in local.properties (see local.properties.example) if you're hacking rather than installing releases.

CI runs tests + assemble on every push; pushing a matching v* tag publishes a signed release automatically.

Legal / disclaimers

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.

More reading

• 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.