Build an Android TV webcam globe app by measuring on the device

u/cyberdinn used Claude Code to write Lukarne, a free MIT-licensed Android TV app. You turn a day-and-night globe with the remote, pick a region and get a grid of up to nine live cams: US road cams, Finnish weather cams and round-the-clock YouTube streams. Claude Code wrote the Kotlin and Compose app, an OpenGL ES globe, a Python pipeline for the cam catalogue and a GitHub Actions job that rebuilds that catalogue daily. It also wrote the scripts that build, install and benchmark the app on an Nvidia Shield, and kept a decision log in the repo with each measurement and the options it dropped.

The first globe, drawn with Compose Canvas, spent 28 ms a frame on land dots alone; the agent moved it to OpenGL ES on its own thread and got about 3 ms and 60 fps. It tested how many H.264 streams the decoder could take, found nine worked, and capped the app at eight. It traced a YouTube cam that froze now and then to a WebView being briefly detached, then checked the fix over a couple of dozen switches. Pulling YouTube frames from GitHub runners failed on a bot check, and the frames were later removed anyway over YouTube's terms.

Key presses sent with adb skewed the timing, so the agent built an in-app autopilot, and debug builds ran about ten times slower, so only release builds were measured. Check the terms of every cam source before shipping: Windy's cams were dropped because its API bans redistribution. Only tested on one Shield running Android 11.