Getting started

Quiblo is distributed as an APK from GitHub Releases. There is no store listing, and there is no auto-update — the app never checks a project-controlled server for anything.

Two APKs are published per release:

• the phone build — install it on a phone or tablet;
• the television build — install it on Android TV or Google TV, usually by sideloading over adb install or a file manager.

They are different application ids, so installing both on one device is fine and they will not interfere. The phone APK will install on a television and will run, but it never appears in the TV launcher — it declares no leanback launcher category. That is by design, not a packaging error.

Minimum Android version is 11 (API 30).

A fresh install opens on two short screens: what Quiblo is, and what you are agreeing to. They are the terms in brief, with the full version a link away — the text is on the screen itself because a television cannot usefully follow a link. There is no decline button. Somebody who does not accept can read and leave; an app that force-quits on decline is theatre, and it teaches people to press the button without reading. You will not see these screens again unless the terms materially change.

Then Quiblo asks who is watching — see Who is watching, and answer it with a name, or with Guest. After that it has no content, so the next step is to add a source.

On the phone that is the Sources destination. On the television it is Settings, then Sources: adding a playlist is something a viewer does once, and a remote should not spend a top-level position on it.

One form covers both kinds, and which one you mean is inferred from what you leave empty:

Fill in	You get
URL only	An M3U playlist
URL + username + password	An Xtream account

That removes a mode toggle from a screen where every control costs a press — which matters much more on a remote than on a phone.

M3U

Either a remote URL or a local file. An M3U carries a display name, optional attributes (tvg-id, tvg-logo, group-title) and a stream URL per entry. It carries no programme schedule, so there is no guide for an M3U source, and that is a property of the format rather than a missing feature.

One consequence worth knowing: the M3U parser assigns every entry the Live kind, because an M3U has no way to say otherwise. The Movies and Series tabs cannot be populated from an M3U at all — they need Xtream.

Xtream

The server address (for example http://example.invalid:8080), a username and a password. Adding the account costs one authentication call and up to six catalogue calls, stopping at the first refusal.

Your password goes into encrypted storage and never into the database, the backup file, or any log.

Worth understanding, because getting an account throttled is the failure mode this project has met most often. See the provider blocks.

Action	Requests
Adding a source, or pressing Refresh	auth + up to 6 catalogue calls
Anything else on a browse screen	none — favouriting, scrolling and filtering are local
A live row the list settles on	one guide call, once ever per channel, skipped when cached
A live row merely scrolled past	none
Asking a channel for its full listing	one call, once per channel per session — and only when you ask
Opening a series	one call, cached for the session
Opening a film	one call, cached for the session

Nothing refreshes automatically. Not on launch, not on tab switch, not on scroll. Every one of the above also passes a token bucket: a burst of eight is allowed through untouched, so a refresh you asked for is never slowed down, and after that requests are spaced one every 400 ms — two and a half a second — however many rows go by.

One thing on this page costs nothing to your provider at all: describing the catalogue talks to The Movie Database with your own key, and never to the panel. It has its own budget.