OpenTV

Everything you watch,
and it stays yours.

OpenTV tracks your shows and films, tells you what to watch next, and keeps the whole library in a database on your own phone. No account. Works offline. Free.

Download for iPhone Get it on Android

Free, no ads, no subscription for the tracker.

What it does

Watch Next

The next unwatched episode of everything you follow, in one list. Mark it and the list moves on.

Films as well as shows

Watched, watchlist, rewatches, and the runtime maths that goes with them.

Episode reminders

A notification the evening something you follow returns, not a weekly digest.

Home-screen widgets

On iOS and Android both.

Statistics that mean something

Hours by genre, decade and network, your longest streak, how your ratings compare with everyone else's — all calculated on the device.

Ratings, feelings, characters

Score an episode, say how it made you feel, and vote for who carried it.

Wrapped, any month or year

Not once a year in December. Any period you like, as a card you can share.

Lists

Build them, order them, publish them, or keep them to yourself.

Six languages

English, Arabic (right-to-left), French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese (BR).

An optional community

Comment on episodes, rate them, follow people. Skip it entirely and the app never phones home.

Backups you own

iCloud on iPhone, Google Drive on Android, and a ZIP you can keep yourself.

Light and dark

Whichever you read comfortably, or whatever the phone is set to.

Where your data actually lives

On your phone, in a database only you can read. The tracker makes no request to any server of ours. There is an optional community — comments, ratings, follows — and joining it is the only thing that ever sends anything. Even then, your episode-by-episode watch history and its dates never leave the device.

You can export everything, any time, as a ZIP. Leaving is as easy as arriving, which is the point: an app you cannot walk out of is not somewhere you should put a decade of your life.

Bringing a library with you

Starting from nothing is fine, but most people arrive carrying years of history. Four ways in:

  1. A TV Time export. Ask them for your data — they are required to send it — and hand OpenTV the ZIP. Every show, episode, watch date, rating and comment goes back where it belongs. The community browser extensions' exports are read too.
  2. A Letterboxd export. For the films half, with dates and star ratings intact.
  3. Plex or Jellyfin. Connect a server and episodes you watch there tick themselves off here. It only ever reads, and only shows you already follow.
  4. Just start. Search, add, and mark as you go.

An import is never destructive and can be run twice: it fills gaps and never duplicates.

Why it exists

TV Time was the tracker millions of people used to tick off episodes, for years. Then it closed. Everyone who asked got their data back as a ZIP of spreadsheets that no app could read, so a decade of watching became a folder nobody could open.

OpenTV started as the thing that could read that folder, and it grew into a tracker in its own right. The lesson it was built on is the one above: a library kept on somebody else's server is a library you can lose in an afternoon. So this one lives on your phone, and you can walk out with it whenever you like.

Every version, and what was in it

OpenTV started as a way to read a TV Time export and has shipped most weeks since. The whole list — the features, the fixes, and the dates.

Latest 1.6.2 Wrapped redesigned, Jellyfin, and a server you can run yourself.
Making it yours

1.6.3

Planned

Three things a stranger found in an hour

The app was posted somewhere unfriendly and the first reply was three bugs, all fair: the buzzing could not be turned off, A–Z filed "The Great" under T, and the filter buttons hid under Android's three-button navigation bar. All three are fixed and waiting for the next release.

1.6.2

7 September 2026Shipped

Wrapped redesigned, Jellyfin, and a server you can run yourself

  • Wrapped, rebuilt. Every month and every year now gets its own card rather than the same layout with different numbers in it, and a year no longer looks like a long month.
  • Jellyfin. Connect a Jellyfin server and episodes you watch there tick themselves off here, the way Plex already did. It only ever reads, and only episodes of shows you already follow.
  • All aired. The shows whose every episode exists — the ones you could actually finish this weekend, rather than catch up on and then wait.
  • The feelings calendar became a profile block. A year of days coloured by how each one felt, on the profile rather than buried a screen away.
  • Your own server. The community half is open source and self-hostable, and the app has a setting to point at your own instance. Tracking never needed a server at all; this is only about the optional community.
  • Plus ends when it ends. A subscription that lapses stops being Plus, and takes nothing with it — every theme, list and statistic you made stays exactly where it is.

On Android now. The iOS build is with Apple.

1.6.1

2 September 2026Shipped

The films TV Time left out of your lists

  • Your lists were missing most of their films, and nothing said so. A TV Time export names a film in a list only if you had already watched, rated or commented on it — so the films that make a watch order a watch order were the ones it could not name. One real 22-film list arrived with 8. OpenTV now recovers the rest.
  • Exports were dropping them too. Films with no name were left out of every backup, and the count was recalculated from the survivors, so the result looked correct. Fixed — and this one predates the feature above.
  • Something to do while it works. Rebuilding a very large library can hold the startup screen for a while, and the only thing on it was a number going up. There is a snake that eats popcorn there now, and a shuffle button for the older catching game.

1.6.0

1 September 2026Shipped

A light theme, Memories, and Plex

  • A light theme, free for everyone. A subscriber said the dark interface was hard for them to read, so this is legibility rather than decoration. Settings → App → Theme: Light, Dark, or follow your phone.
  • Memories. What you were watching on this day in every earlier year, with the artwork, and an optional reminder when there is something to see.
  • Plex. Connect a Plex server and episodes you watch there tick themselves off here. It only ever adds episodes of shows you already follow, and never writes back to Plex.
  • Your TV Time name. One export can now claim one profile, so the same file cannot be used to take name after name.
  • The startup repair screen stopped appearing on every single launch.

1.5.0

30 August 2026Shipped

Shared lists, profile widgets, and OpenTV Plus

  • Shared lists. A list two people build together, where every row says who added it.
  • Profile widgets. The profile became blocks you arrange yourself instead of one fixed layout.
  • Live translation of comments written in a language you do not read.
  • OpenTV Plus. Optional, and it buys extras — unlimited lists and favourites, the accent colour, OLED black, custom app icons. Tracking, importing and exporting stay free, permanently.

1.4.1 & 1.4.2

18 August 2026Shipped

A backup Android actually has

  • Google Drive backup. iPhones had silent iCloud backup since 1.1; Android had a button you were asked to remember to press. Same schedule, same file, same restore — Android just had further to travel.
  • 1.4.2 was a same-week fix: opening somebody's profile could crash the app.

1.4.0

15 August 2026Shipped

Wrapped, filters, and private accounts

  • Wrapped — a monthly and yearly look back at what you watched, free, calculated on the phone.
  • Private accounts, and control over which shows other people can see.
  • Advanced filtering across your library, and a page for every actor.
  • The app went open source, so the import pipeline stays available to whoever needs it.
The community

1.3.0 & 1.3.1

11–13 August 2026Shipped

Comments, ratings and people — all optional

  • Sign in with Google or Apple, pick a username, and comment on episodes, rate them and follow people.
  • Skip it and nothing changes. The tracker never contacts a server, and your episode-by-episode history stays on the phone whether you join or not.
  • 1.3.1 arrived two days later with the fixes the first real day of traffic found.
The tracker

1.2.1

7 August 2026Shipped

Six languages

English, Arabic — properly right-to-left, not mirrored text in a left-to-right layout — French, Italian, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.

1.2.0

30 July 2026Shipped

TheTVDB, lists, sharing and iPad

  • TheTVDB became the main source of show information, which fixed a long tail of anime and older series that were matching to the wrong thing.
  • Custom lists, share cards, iPad layouts, and an offline cache that means the app works on a plane.

1.1.9

24 July 2026Shipped

Rescuing photos from a CDN that was switching off

Photos attached to old TV Time comments lived on TV Time's servers. This release pulled them down onto the phone while they were still there to pull.

1.1.8

20 July 2026Shipped

A faster import, and one worth watching

The import got several times quicker and grew a live count of the shows, episodes and films landing as they land. Also: custom lists, a poster picker, and character art for anime.

1.1.4 – 1.1.7

17–18 July 2026Shipped

The first week after launch

  • Episode notifications, an upcoming schedule, trending, and filters.
  • Deleting a show properly, so it stayed deleted, and a counter that stopped drifting when you unmarked a season.
  • Imports became resumable — closing the app halfway no longer meant starting again.

1.0 – 1.1.0

9–12 July 2026Shipped

Hand it the ZIP

The first release. Read a TV Time export — every show, episode, watch date, rating and comment — and rebuild all of it in a database on your own phone, with no account anywhere. Everything above is built on this.

Open source

The app is public under the MPL-2.0 licence, so the import pipeline stays available to the people who need it — read it, build it yourself, or improve it. Source on GitHub.

Show and film information comes from TheTVDB and TMDB.