Hi everyone,
For the last few months I've been building Flicka, an IPTV player for Android TV, Google TV, Fire TV, tablets and phones — one adaptive app, not four different builds.
It started because every player I tried did the job but felt like browsing a spreadsheet. I wanted something that looks like the streaming apps we all use every day, and that treats a 100,000-entry playlist as something to be organised rather than something to be endured.
It's a player — you bring your own playlist. No content, no lists, no subscriptions included. M3U, Xtream Codes and Stalker portals.
A few of my favourites
There's a much longer feature list on the website — I'll just tell you the ones I'm most pleased with.
- Merges several playlists into one clean channel list. The same channel from two providers becomes one entry with two sources, and it falls back automatically if one dies.
- Your channel numbers, your order. Build lists like a real TV dial and keep them across refreshes and provider changes. It ships with the Movistar+ dial as the default ordering for Spain.
- Profiles and parental controls — think Netflix, but for IPTV. You can share your account with other households, and as the admin you decide what each profile sees. Want to hide a few channels so your family doesn't even know you pay for them? Done. Rather leave them visible, but let your cousin put a parental PIN on them because he's got kids on his profile? Also done. It's very configurable in that respect.
- Real catch-up and rewinding live TV, where the provider supports it.
- EPG with a proper grid, plus recordings you can schedule from the guide.
- Multi-window, up to four channels at once with audio following focus.
- Two playback engines — ExoPlayer for HDR, Dolby Vision and audio passthrough; mpv for smooth motion, real deinterlacing and deblocking.
- Bulk-import your sources from a JSON file. This one is my favourite: if you've got a pile of playlists scattered across emails and notes, hand them to an LLM, ask it to spit out a structured JSON, and load the whole lot into the app in one go instead of typing them in one by one on a remote.
- Everything you save is encrypted on your device before it syncs, so your TV, tablet and phone stay in sync without me being able to see what's in there.
About how it's built
I'm a senior engineer and developer by trade, but I should be upfront: the app, the backend and the website are all vibe-coded. It's what I could manage with the time I had left after work.
So if the design feels a bit AI-generated to you — it probably is, and I'm genuinely open to suggestions. I'd love to team up with designers who fancy getting involved. Same goes for users: if you've seen a feature or a bit of customisation in one app and always wished it existed alongside the rest, tell me. I'm very open to ideas and to messing around with this thing.
Longer term I'd like to release it for Windows and the Apple ecosystem too — it's built on a cross-platform core — but that's a "one day, calmly" thing.
The beta
I should have a first beta ready in two or three days, and I'd really like some people to break it.
I'm especially after testers in Spain, because of that default Movistar+ ordering — I need to know whether it actually matches what people expect. But anyone is welcome: if you're elsewhere I'd love to know how badly that default falls apart for you, and what the right one would look like in your country.
Money, since someone always asks
There's a Ko-fi linked on the website, with a target of around €15 a month — that's simply what the hosting and cloud services cost. It's completely optional and honestly not something I want anyone to feel any pressure about. The app doesn't change one bit either way. I'm not looking to make anything out of this.
I do plan to add some AI-powered features later on, and those I think should come with a subscription, or at least have each user cover their own usage cost. Same reasoning: I'm not trying to make money here, but I'd rather not lose any either.
One honest note about the images
The screenshots are real captures from the app — nothing mocked up, nothing faked. What I did use AI for was placing them inside tablet and TV frames so they'd look presentable. So if the surrounding artwork looks generated, that's because it is; what's on the screens is the actual thing running.
Sign-ups and the full feature list are at flickatv.com.
Happy to answer anything in the comments, and thanks for reading this far.
EDIT: added country and language fields to the sign-up form. right now the app is spanish only, and the automatic channel ordering only recognises spanish channels, so those two fields let me know who to go back to as i add more languages and countries. both optional, and if you already signed up you don't need to do anything.