NewPipe – ad-free, open-source Android YouTube client

This is the best youtube client, bar none. It keeps local history and &quot;subscriptions&quot; without requiring you to log in to google. I use it on an Amazon Fire Tablet. There seems to be no iOS equivalent, which is one of the things preventing me from upgrading to an iPad.<p>Has anybody used it recently on AndroidTV &#x2F; FireTV? I&#x27;ve tried it several times in the past, and its always been wonky there. I use SmartYouTubeTV (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smartyoutubetv.github.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smartyoutubetv.github.io&#x2F;</a>) on AndroidTV right now, and the logged out experience is terrible.

I hope the developers are here. I&#x27;m so grateful for this app and especially the support : Everytime YouTube obfuscates their API to take them down, they quickly publish an updated app that works.<p>please donate : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newpipe.schabi.org&#x2F;donate&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newpipe.schabi.org&#x2F;donate&#x2F;</a>

Probably my favourite part about Newpipe is the option to skip silences. If you&#x27;re watching&#x2F;listening to a speech-only video, it (at least feels) like such an improvement.

I absolutely love newpipe, and use it exclusively over the youtube app on android.<p>On a similar note - I also have found invidious [1] to be so much better than the normal youtube web frontend, and use it almost exclusively for my desktop youtube usage. It might be an unfair comparison because I am not a google user and the youtube website is terrible for non-logged-in users, but for us it is an absolute godsend. I am not sure how it works as far as views and add revenue and all that, and certainly the ability to thumbs-up and comment is disabled unless you click through to the youube link and log in, but I generally try to support the channels I follow through other means so I do not feel too bad about it.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;iv-org&#x2F;invidious" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;iv-org&#x2F;invidious</a>

There are some more options available if it happens that you don&#x27;t like Newpipe: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.layluh.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.layluh.com&#x2F;</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freetubeapp.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freetubeapp.io&#x2F;</a> <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;omega.gg&#x2F;MotionBox&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;omega.gg&#x2F;MotionBox&#x2F;</a> <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.viewpure.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.viewpure.com</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;df-tube-distraction-free&#x2F;mjdepdfccjgcndkmemponafgioodelna" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;df-tube-distractio...</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;toogl.es" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;toogl.es</a>

I both pay for yt premium and use newpipe on older (degoogled) devices where using latest youtube.apk is not an option anymore. Also, where I live yt premium is a fraction of the cost of many developed countries, cheap for me but not for many in this country. In some countries yt premium is not even available.<p>I read a lot &#x27;entitled&#x27; opinions in this thread pretending that the whole world should ignore their circumstances and just do whatever works for them (ie. Pay for yt premium). The internet is global: why would you think that using open source software to access bits off of global internet is unethical&#x2F;illegitimate?

I read a lot of people&#x27;s experiences here in the thread and I think a lot of you really should give YouTube Premium a try. It solves most of the problems you are describing, while also paying the creators

Will check it out.<p>The last 3 years I&#x27;ve been very happy with &quot;YouTube Vanced&quot;, in particular because of: background play, native adblocking, fully native logged in experience if desired, AND it switches to audio only encode if background play is enabled so it saves data.<p>Get it here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vanced.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vanced.app&#x2F;</a>

This remains a killer app for me on Android. I don&#x27;t know if anything equivalent exists on iOS, to enable background playing and video downloads (and you can choose whether to download them as audio files).

The app is great, but wasn&#x27;t google recently banning user accounts for it? Youtube account and google account is same thing, so this app is useful only for othwerwise ungoogled users

NewPipe is fantastic, but worth mentioning since I don&#x27;t see it so far, that the one killer downside is &quot;no support for Chromecasting&#x2F;DLNA&quot; [1] [2], which means I continue to keep the official YouTube app around for occasional use when I want a bigger screen.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;TeamNewPipe&#x2F;NewPipe&#x2F;issues&#x2F;105" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;TeamNewPipe&#x2F;NewPipe&#x2F;issues&#x2F;105</a> [2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;TeamNewPipe&#x2F;NewPipe&#x2F;issues&#x2F;668" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;TeamNewPipe&#x2F;NewPipe&#x2F;issues&#x2F;668</a>

Isn&#x27;t it against Google&#x27;s terms and conditions to run such an app that plays YouTube videos without playing the ads too? I remember reading about that.

Watching youtube videos using Google&#x27;s bandwidth, without watching any ads or paying for sub, I don&#x27;t see how this could be legit in the long term.

YouTube is one of the worst Android apps in regards of usability, accidental clicks, and anoying ads.<p>It would be great if there was a way installing the app without allowing third party sources.<p>Haven&#x27;t developed on Android since years. Does anyone know if I can build it and upload it via ADB without enabling apps from 3rd party sources.

This is why, despite all its shortcomings, Android still is a more open platform compared to iOS. Big thanks to F-Droid and the open source Android community.

something I&#x27;ve always wondered:<p>why hasn&#x27;t anyone built a fully-featured desktop Youtube front-end experience? With, like, borderless floating video (a la Firefox&#x27;s floating video feature), dimming the desktop, a search experience that doesn&#x27;t bombard you with clickbait garbage, etc?<p>it seems like Youtube.com is really just a fancy mp4 player, targeting static video content.<p>does Youtube actively do anything to prevent such clients from existing? What&#x27;s their stance on them? Will they one day change the service so the video stream urls are generated randomly, or obfuscated, and break every 3rd party client?

Youtube Vanced is another ad-free client (albeit not open source) that you can login with your Google account: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vanced.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vanced.app&#x2F;</a>

I used this a bit on a previous Android phone I had. (I still use Android, but am on a newer one now) It sounds good in theory but had a lot of rough edges that made me just go back to regular Youtube. I remember running into a lot of hiccups going full screen and not full screen, or rotating screens, or moving forward or backward on a video. Nothing was completely breaking but it was all minor issues like switching between full screen and not either stops a video or throws you back etc. Maybe I never got used to it.<p>And most of all, and this is weird to admit on HN, I kind of enjoy Youtube&#x27;s algorithm of recommending videos -- it actually presents content that I would be interested in. Every time I opened Newpipe it was just a random mishmash of stuff, maybe it&#x27;s what&#x27;s on the default Youtube homepage or something, but it&#x27;s never something I&#x27;m interested in. It&#x27;s nice for when I want to explicitly search for something to watch, but not if I want to just open up the app and tap some random video to start watching.<p>I&#x27;ll just add a side note that I don&#x27;t watch political videos or anything and it&#x27;s not about echo chamber or bubbles. I just watch videos about old video games (think AVGN etc.) or listen to music by artists I enjoy, and those are the videos that show up on my Youtube which is nice.

Of all things I am grateful to NewPipe for, the best is that I am able to turn off the screen of my mobile while listening to Podcasts hosted on YouTube, and also to run it in the background. Thank you, developers!!!

I have tried NewPipe, but I guess I&#x27;m not its target user.<p>I use YouTube frequently, but I almost always just watch my subscriptions.<p>By not having a login system, it is basically rendered useless despite how nice it is to be ad-free and having a much cleaner UI<p>(I knew you can import subscription, but I sub and unsub channels constantly so it becomes a pain very quickly.)<p>I&#x27;m currently using YouTube Vanced instead.

Serious question: What is the ethical argument for watching videos ad-free this way vs paying for YouTube Premium? (as long as it&#x27;s available in your country, and you can afford it)<p>By removing ads, you&#x27;re viewing content without paying back in any meaningful way. You might say that you give donations to the content creators you <i>really</i> like, but I don&#x27;t find that very convincing (you cannot donate to every small YouTuber you ever encounter while browsing, not all content creators churn out 100s of videos).<p>Besides, it probably costs a ton of money to store&#x2F;process billions of videos each month, and stream billions of 1080p (or even 4K) of videos to all devices.<p>I understand people are fundamentally against ads (I also find them life-sucking and extremely obnoxious), but there is an option that does just that while fairly contributing back into the ecosystem that produces your content.

Somewhere I read that using such apps may get your account blocked by google.<p>not sure how much truth in that, but I&#x27;ve avoided using such apps because of that.

I absolutely love NewPipe but I do think that it progresses very slowly and that might be why it is often ignored for the other popular pip youtube client, youtube vanced.<p>Maybe it is just the rate at which binaries get released... For example, it has had comments support for some time now but only for top level comments. However, iirc the pull request that introduced this also had an example implementation of <i>fully working</i> comment support. So why is this not yet implemented?<p>I recognise that I should probably just build from master or some dev branch which has more features myself...

I&#x27;m completely against Google usage of personal informations and hate annoying and bad ux on official YouTube app but, to be honest, ads support creators with revenue so when you &quot;avoid ads&quot;, you are harming creators too, not only Google.<p>I think that if you don&#x27;t like YT app and advertising, you simply shouldn&#x27;t use YouTube.

The only thing that&#x27;s stopping me from using these Youtube alternative apps is fear of my Google account being banned.

Nice. Just discovered that you can open videos from the official YouTube client by using the &quot;Share&quot; menu and selecting NewPipe. It has multiple options, including download&#x2F;open&#x2F;open as popup.<p>This make it much more useful for me, I can still have access to my YouTube account but I can open the actual videos in NewPipe and skip ads&#x2F;have more control of the playback options.<p>Also, this bug from official YouTube app does not happen in NewPipe, making it much more useful to me since I use a custom caption settings because Amazon Prime Video (but they look horrible in official YouTube app because there is no outline): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;youtube&#x2F;comments&#x2F;e935yz&#x2F;bug_captions_in_youtube_android_app_has_no&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;youtube&#x2F;comments&#x2F;e935yz&#x2F;bug_caption...</a>

An excellent app. Plays stuff in the background and has a built-in downloader, for those big podcasts on the go.

Awesome! This type of app will always lead to greater conversions for Youtube Premium. I had Youtube vanced and could not live without those features but I also wanted to support creators so I got Youtube Premium and never looked back

Looks nice, but no ability to set default playback speed means I&#x27;ll stick with (the rarely updated) Vanced. I never watch YT content at &lt;1.25x speed unless it&#x27;s to hear a music track.<p>It also looks like it doesn&#x27;t have the option to login and sync, so I&#x27;d be seeing already watched stuff on between desktop and mobile. I understand why some people wouldn&#x27;t want that, but I use the feature all the time and would like the option.<p>I might try it as a kind of backup app for things I want to track, but don&#x27;t want suggestions for (mostly technical videos).

Incredible. The idea that YouTube artificially limits the function to get you to do stuff is really annoying. I love that you can send the audio to the background. I&#x27;ve wanted that for years.

Excellent app.<p>I implemented the update notification for the GitHub APKs few years back.

To those who are looking for few convincing features over YouTube app - It has background playback, download, pop out player all without having to sign-in to any account.

This is a side note, but: I tried to install newpipe (by first installing F Droid), and Google prevented my pixel 3 from doing so because I am a user of Advanced Protection Program.<p>The OS has application permissions for apps: why is a feature designed to protect my account (and only my account) preventing me from independently installing free and open source software?

Another major advantage (for me) of NewPipe over any official app is that it supports other services (such as SoundCloud).<p>I find the ability to seamlessly switch between services, and create playlists containing both YouTube videos and SoundCloud audio, to be a complete game-changer.<p>I doubt I could easily go back to the official YouTube app now.

Don&#x27;t seem to be able to snag it via F-Droid, the app seems to be 2yo without updates... May look again later.

I&#x27;ve been following this app for a while, and for a long time I was using a PR version of the app that kept the subscription list in order of time (which didn&#x27;t exist for a really long time). But they finally merged it a while back, so the published app finally became usable for me.

Oh they finally fixed the audio desync bug (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;TeamNewPipe&#x2F;NewPipe&#x2F;issues&#x2F;3550" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;TeamNewPipe&#x2F;NewPipe&#x2F;issues&#x2F;3550</a>)<p>It was a big pain for me. Made the app unusable.

Remember, &quot;your contract with the network when you get the show is you&#x27;re going to watch the spots.&quot; If Google catches you attempting to circumvent ads, they are within their rights to consider you a thief and treat you accordingly.

The app sounds good from the comments, but can you drill a bit more as to how you&#x27;re filtering out the adds ?<p>Is it a remote proxy to filter ? Local lists of blaclist etc.<p>Some more info would be cool<p>Edit : The comments are so good I&#x27;m more suspicious! :D

I wonder how long this is going to stay up ?<p>Google can&#x27;t be too happy that people access their service without paying either with eyeball time for advertisers or money for Youtube Red or whatever it is called today

Wait what, how does YouTube just serve its video streams to any client?

Anybody know why YouTube doesn&#x27;t plug the ad-bypassing loophole of fetching the content directly youtube-dl style? I presume this NewPipe client is doing something similar...

What does ad-free mean? Arent ads embedded in the youtube videos itself such that when you play a long video, multiple ads show up in the beginning, middle and end of the video ?

There are people whose living is made from YouTube and it’s advertising component.<p>Whilst I would personally prefer videos with no ads, is this not stealing?<p>I would be very interested to hear this groups view on why this is morally ok. Also what alternatives there should be to an ad revenue model for YouTube type sites.

How are they able to legally not have ads? How is that not theft?

I&#x27;m quite enjoying NewPipe but it cries out for one killer feature: being able to swipe videos off your What&#x27;s New feed to whittle it down.

So why can&#x27;t people alternatively create a website on the similar theme: YouTube with no ads. Is this against Youtube&#x27;s TOS?

I only keep youtube app for the livestreams. Livestreams on NewPipe don&#x27;t allow you to replay back several hours behind.

Can someone do a comparison to Vanced? Been using vanced for a long time, what&#x27;s here that&#x27;s worth switching.

Worthwhile checking YouTube Vanced too. It looks and acts more like youtube, but newpipe has it&#x27;s benefits too

Related: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;invidio.us" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;invidio.us</a>

it seems to be a great app. gonna be a big conscience challenge for me though. I always feel that my guilt of blocking ads on desktop can be compensated by allowing ads on mobile... (i know it&#x27;s hypocrisy to most ppls opinion)

Somewhat related:<p>Is anyone familiar with youtube.videodeck.net &#x2F; pockettube? Aggregates channels into subscription columns like RSS. Like old youtube collections. I&#x27;ve been using the service for years and have yet to see anyone else replicate the feature.

It looks good but rarely works as intended, way to buggy.

noob question here - i dont know what F-droid is. Is this meant to be installed from the Play Store or do i have to &quot;jailbreak&quot; my android?

This is my most missed app since moving to iOS.

There is another one called Youtube Vanced

This is gonna get shut down so quick.

This even runs without play services

I wish this existed for iPhone too

will this ever be on Google play? most peoppe should not be in the habit of sideloading apps...

I <i>really</i> wonder why so many innocuous, on-topic comments about NewPipe are being downvoted in this thread. Are YouTube employees raiding HN or something? &#x2F;s<p>NewPipe is a great app, lighter on system resources than the official YouTube app, free &amp; open-source, and a joy to use especially if you&#x27;re overwhelmed by the serious UI &quot;bloat&quot; that YouTube has been suffering from in recent years. In addition to being ad-free, in many other ways is it a superior video-viewing experience.

This is the only app we allow our kids to watch YouTube on. It dispenses with the ads and 90% of the tricks they use to keep you watching (no overlays at the end and no autoplay).

Youtube might be the only place I actually don&#x27;t mind ads. Some creators on youtube are extremely good at providing valuable content in short form - I use it primarily as a learning platform, whether I am doing wood work, learning how to fix something at home, or learning about a new topic. I would rather continue to support these creators by watching ads on their own channel than paying for a subscription that covers everything.<p>It&#x27;s an invaluable resource and until there&#x27;s something better taking the ads away takes part of their income away.