WearTube

A standalone YouTube client for Wear OS. Runs entirely on the watch — no phone app, no companion, no bridge.

Built for Galaxy Watch Ultra / Ultra 2, and sized to work on any round or square Wear OS display.

Features

• Your real feed — sign in with a TV-style device code (you type a short code on your phone; the watch never sees your password) and Home shows your actual YouTube recommendations and subscriptions. Signed out, it builds a feed from channels you follow locally.
• Search with the watch keyboard or voice, plus suggestions
• Channels — browse uploads, subscribe/unsubscribe (syncs to your account)
• Playlists — your account's playlists, plus Play All queueing
• Player — quality picker (144p–480p), speed control, ±10s, tap-to-seek, rotating bezel for volume, audio-only mode
• Background audio — keeps playing when you leave the app, with a chip on the watch face and full system media controls
• Mini player — persistent play/pause pill on every screen
• Comments, autoplay-next, Watch Later, history and resume positions

Install

Wear OS doesn't have a sideload UI, so install over adb:

adb connect <watch-ip>:<port>
adb install WearTube.apk

Enable Settings → Developer options → Wireless debugging on the watch first and read the IP/port from that screen. The port changes whenever the watch sleeps.

Building

gradle assembleRelease

Requires the Android command-line tools with platforms;android-37.1. A signing keystore is generated automatically on first release build and is never committed — back it up if you intend to publish updates.

How it works

WearTube talks to YouTube's InnerTube endpoints directly and plays streams with Media3/ExoPlayer. Two details do most of the heavy lifting:

• Pinned player client. Current client versions return SABR responses with no stream URLs at all. The app pins known-good versions and falls back across several clients.
• Per-URL byte budgets. A googlevideo URL serves roughly 0.5–2MB in total and then refuses everything, regardless of how small each range is. The app tracks a budget per URL, prefetches a replacement before it runs out, and swaps transparently underneath ExoPlayer, so a refusal never reaches the decoder.

Notes

This is an unofficial client and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by YouTube or Google. It is provided for personal use.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.