A community developer has introduced Arloes, a third-party Emby client for Android TV, announced on the Emby forum. The project started from the existing Android TV app as a base but was rebuilt on a modern architecture, with a visual style inspired by popular Kodi skins. The name is Welsh for "pioneering" and is pronounced ar-loys.
It connects to your existing Emby server, so there is nothing new to install on the server side. The author describes it as aiming for the feel of a current streaming app: artwork first, cinematic, and designed for the big screen.
What it offers
- Home screen: a full-bleed spotlight with title logos, cast information and one-press play. Optional MDBList ratings can add scores from Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, Trakt, TMDB and Letterboxd.
- Browsing: poster walls for movies and shows, episode lists that flag what is up next, and dedicated spotlights for collections.
- Title pages: synopsis, the full ratings suite from the MDBList API, and exact formats before playback, down to the Dolby Vision profile.
- Subtitles: choose a track on the title page or search Open Subtitles without leaving the show, in a dedicated panel.
- Live TV: a clean programme guide and a channel picker that slides in over whatever is playing.
- Player and navigation: a modernized player showing title logo, progress, remaining time and end time in one place, plus a choice of top bar, collapsed side rail or expanding side rail.
- Personalization and settings: a custom accent color and focus highlight, and settings where each option explains itself in plain language.
- Sorting: extra sort functions, including sorting TV shows by episodes left to watch. The author notes this was the request that originally started the project years ago.
Parity and status
The developer says the app reaches full parity with the current client: the same ExoPlayer, the same external player support, and nothing stripped out, just improvements. It is still in active development, tested by family and friends as well as on the author's own Shield, Fire sticks and Google streamers. The author is waiting on Google for Play Store availability but can share the APK directly for beta testers. There is no app tracking and no data harvesting, according to the post.
Commentary for self-hosters
Third-party clients are one of the healthiest signs in the Emby ecosystem, and Arloes is a good example of someone scratching their own itch and sharing the result. Because it talks to your existing server and keeps the same player stack, trying it is low-risk: keep your current client installed, test on one device first, and check that your libraries, subtitles and Live TV setup behave as expected before rolling it out to the household. The plain-language settings and subtitle search panel are the kind of touches that make a TV client pleasant for family members who never open a dashboard. If you run Emby at home, our Emby plugins can round out the server side while you experiment with the client.