Lauscher

Lauscher — Sony headphone control for Sailfish OS

Lauscher talks to your Sony headphones the way Sony's own phone app does, over Bluetooth: it reads their battery levels and settings and lets you change them from your SailfishOS device, without an account, a cloud service or a second phone.

It is a control channel, not an audio one. Your music keeps playing over the usual Bluetooth route while Lauscher is open.

What it shows and changes

• Battery for each part the headset reports — left, right and the charging case.
• Playback: what is playing, play/pause, next and previous track, and the volume.
• Ambient sound control: off, noise cancelling or ambient sound, with the ambient level and focus on voice.
• Listening mode: standard, ambient background music (including how far away the room should feel), cinema, voice boost and sound leakage reduction — whichever of them your headset offers.
• Connected devices: the two source devices the headset holds at once, which one has playback, and whether the headset may move playback on its own.
• Device info: model, firmware, codec and serial number.
• A cover page that shows battery and the current mode at a glance, and steps through the listening modes without opening the app.

Lauscher shows only what your headset advertises. Two Sony models rarely offer the same set of features, so a section that is missing is one this device did not offer — the LinkBuds Clip, for instance, is open-ear and has no noise cancelling at all.

Before you start

Pair the headset in the Bluetooth settings first. Lauscher lists what is paired and speaks the Sony protocol, and connects on tap. If your headset is paired but missing from the list, connect it once in the Bluetooth settings so the phone reads its services again.

Only one app can hold the control channel at a time. Leaving the device page closes it on purpose, so Sony's own app — or another phone — can take over right away.

Devices

Developed and tested against the Sony LinkBuds Clip and the WF-C700N, on a Jolla Phone (2026). Other Sony headsets speaking the same protocol are expected to work, and the app shows whichever features they report. The older protocol of the WH-1000XM4 and its generation is built in but has not been tried — reports welcome.

This is version 0.1, a first release: everything listed above has been used on real hardware, but on one headset model.

Languages

English and German.

Credits and licence

The protocol is spoken by libmdr from the SonyHeadphonesClient project (MIT), formatting inside it uses fmt (MIT), and the Bluetooth connection is set up by BlueZ through the profile API bluetoothd already offers every app on the phone.

Lauscher is free software under the GNU GPLv3 or later. Sources: https://github.com/Wunderfitz/harbour-lauscher

Lauscher is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed or certified by Sony.

Lauscher was written together with Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, in Claude Code.