Aurelia and Aurelia TV Jellyfin clients enter closed testing on Android
A developer working on native Jellyfin clients for Android has moved into closed testing on Google Play with two separate apps: Aurelia, aimed at phones and tablets, and Aurelia TV, built for Android TV and Google TV. The announcement was shared on r/jellyfin.
Both apps are written in Kotlin with Jetpack Compose, and each has its own interface and platform-specific features rather than one layout stretched across devices. The developer says the release took roughly a month and a half longer than first expected, with that time spent on internal testing and fixes: about 13 internal builds of Aurelia TV and 3 of Aurelia mobile before opening up to the community.
What each app brings
Aurelia for mobile and tablet has an adaptive touch UI, a custom native player built on Media3 ExoPlayer and libmpv with hardware acceleration, Direct Play/Stream and advanced controls. It also lists background offline downloads with pause/resume, custom storage locations and a choice of original or transcoded quality, plus multi-server and multi-user support, playlists, collections, genres, search and an Explore view. Playback extras include trickplay timeline previews, Skip Intro and Skip Credits. Live TV covers channel browsing, an interactive EPG and playback of recorded programs, and the developer notes that Live TV playback does not depend on server-side transcoding. There is also experimental Seerr/Overseerr integration, server management (health, tasks, active sessions, broadcast messages and custom toast notifications to individual sessions) and Quick Connect login.
Aurelia TV focuses on the big screen: a D-pad-driven interface with leanback-style browsing, multiple handcrafted themes and Season and Show screens tuned for quick viewing. Its player supports Media3 ExoPlayer, libmpv and the Jellyfin MDK engine, with native libmpv ASS/SSA rendering for complex styled subtitles where possible. It shares hardware acceleration, Direct Play/Stream, trickplay previews, Skip Intro and Skip Credits, and it offers Live TV with channel browsing, an interactive EPG and recorded-program playback.
Who this affects
Anyone running a Jellyfin server for a household of Android users, especially those with both phones and a TV box, has a new native client option to evaluate. Closed testing means access is limited for now, so this is a good moment to watch progress rather than plan a migration.
Commentary for self-hosters
A second native Android client family is welcome, because client quality often decides how a self-hosted library actually feels day to day. Before you get excited, keep expectations in check: closed testing is exactly that, and features can shift. If you join, test it against your own library, your subtitle-heavy files and your Live TV setup, and report issues with logs. Also note that a client which handles Live TV playback without server-side transcoding can take load off a modest server, but the codec support of your specific device still matters. If you would like to support our work on Jellyfin tooling, have a look at our Jellyfin plugins.