A new day, a new full release. In today’s update, NewPipe is proudly bringing you a mute button and a great way to manage your subscribed channels, on top of the usual smaller improvements and fixes.

Feed groups

Since moving images say more than my words, please have a look at them:

For those who prefer to read, this is for you: NewPipe now supports grouping subscribed channels into feeds. All the recent videos of those channels can be seen at once when you refresh the feed. We have @mauriciocolli to thank for that.

An additional feature squashed into this change is the implementation of a so called fast-mode. If you enable it in the Content settings, those feeds will load much faster from the services which provide a dedicated feed. The downside is that those feeds contain less information, which might result in the duration or the live status of videos not being shown in the preview. The decision is up to you: Living on the speeding edge and missing information or taking it nice and slow, but knowing everything.

What’s New now shows the latest videos first! (Finally!)

Part of the above feature is also the much improved What's New sidebar feed. By improved I mean fixed: The videos now show in the correct order of uploading, whereas the previous version showed the first video of each channel in a random order (roughly in the order you subscribed to them). And on top of that, live streams now have a viewer count in those feeds!

Mute button

This release doesn’t stop at channel groups, though. Thanks to @karkaminski, NewPipe now has a mute button. @B0pol molded it further into the shape you can experience it in now. “But where can I find it?” you ask. Fear not, for I have prepared a gallery of screenshots. To access the pop-up and background player menus shown, you need to press on the notification from NewPipe.

Smaller Improvements

@comradekingu took care of the English base strings in this release and made sure they are consistent. Further improving the user experience was also @XiangRongLin’s goal, who made sure users do not get “stuck” when seeking in the main video player with seek duration set to 5 seconds and inexact seek enabled. Previously users could not seek backwards when hitting the rewind button. Thanks to @opusforlife2, two settings moved from Appearance to Content, where they belonged all along: Show 'Next' and Content of main page.

@wb9688 and @B0pol (in his second contribution) added share-to-NewPipe support for more URLs. Now music.youtube.com and media.ccc.de are natively supported. Thanks, you two. In the last point in this section, @jonas-skywalker (may the force be with you) improved the search section. Now the magnifying glass vanishes once you start typing.

Fixes a.k.a. NewPipe crashes less \o/

Android 9 changed how databases behave, effectively destroying backups and exporting remote playlists - not anymore, thanks to @yausername. @XiangRongLin improved sharing a downloaded video to other apps, which crashed the app before this release. The seek duration setting was not properly shown in any other language than English, but @B0pol let them magically appear again. And finally, @kapodamy took care of a nasty bug, which made some WebM videos non seekable. Now you can seek all you want. He also fixed a crash when you tried to download a really large video.

All of the following fixes were done by the incredible @mauriciocolli. Overall, he brought seven (!) different contributions to today’s release. He solved an issue where the last screen of the app could be popping up during the app exit animation. A bug in the main screen resulted in tabs not being restored correctly if the app was put to sleep by Android. The main screen had another issue, especially with the menu, which could vanish until the user interacted with the app again. Sharing a YouTube link with NewPipe could end up crashing NewPipe if certain characters were in those links, which is not an issue anymore. And finally, he improved the handling of unavailable content on YouTube, which resulted in a crash previously.

Development

This release also includes two big improvements in the development process. @Stypox and @mauriciocolli changed the way .apk files are generated in the development process. This makes it way easier to test a change on your device, since you can install all of these test versions of Newpipe alongside each other, as long as you have the storage for them.

@Poolitzer (that’s me!) created up-to-date issue templates, which makes it easier for you to report a bug or suggest a feature. Their final form that you are experiencing is the result of the combined effort of the whole community, thanks to everyone who forced me to implement and discuss their suggestions, especially @opusforlife2 and @B0pol.

Conclusion

That’s it for this release. A big thanks goes out to all the people who made this possible, especially those not mentioned: Developers for helping out fellow developers, testers for testing, maintainers for maintaining, translators for translating and users like you for reporting the bugs in the first place. If you’d like to get a more technical view into the app, you can find the release page here and the corresponding PR here.

Today, I want to especially point out our IRC channel. Feel free to join our welcoming community in these trying times, just to chat with all of us, or discuss NewPipe, uptimes of servers, Ubuntu derivation and even floppy disks, apparently. It is free, easy and fun (I promise). I also would love to shine some light on a big step in our translating area: Nepali is fully translated. Good job everybody involved in that. If you want to check out how you can help, head over to Weblate.

If you also like the idea of contributing to this project, but nothing has spoken to you so far, maybe you’d like to write blog posts? Please see this issue.

Where to get the latest version

NewPipe notifies you about new versions, you can download them when you press the notification. An alternative is the GitHub release page. If you use the F-Droid app, it notifies you as well about an update for NewPipe - please keep in mind that it can take F-Droid a while to update their repository.

Please let us know what your experience of the latest release is, especially bugs in need of fixing. As usual, you can reach out to us via IRC (#newpipe on Libera.Chat), open issues on GitHub or ideally use our built-in crash reporter to send us machine-readable issue reports. You can even send in fixes yourself.