We’re happy to announce NewPipe 0.28.1, which polishes the user experience while quietly fixing a large number of long-standing bugs. This release comes with a new version of NewPipe Extractor (0.25.0) that fixes several issues with data extraction while also providing additional data to the app.

We wanted to bring you a big Christmas release, but it turned out to be more of a New Year’s gift instead. Either way, we hope you’ll enjoy the improvements and fixes in this release!

We’d like to thank all contributors, especially those who recently joined the project. Many small improvements and fixes were made possible by new contributors, such as students from the Australian National University who worked on NewPipe as part of their Software Engineering course or folks who just came to stay. This release includes more than 50 user-facing merged PRs as well as tons of developer-facing PRs. We’d also like to thank all translators for keeping NewPipe accessible to users worldwide.

Highlights

• The player uses the original audio language by default again and handles clicking on timestamps and fullscreen changes much better
• Downloading content should be less error prone and OPUS audio downloads now include some metadata
• Many fixes that eliminate crashes, UI glitches, and confusing states

Everybody likes metadata, we do too!

When downloading audio in OPUS format, NewPipe now embeds additional metadata:

• Artist/uploader name
• Track name/title
• Genre (if available)
• Date

This makes downloaded files look much better in music players and media libraries. We are currently working on adding metadata fields to other formats as well. Cover art/thumbnails are also in the works.

Playback & player improvements

Clicking timestamps in the comments no longer clears your queue or unexpectedly resets playback. Your current player state is preserved, making navigation within videos much more predictable. The player now uses the original audio language by default again, instead of preferring autotranslated audio tracks. We are sorry for initially choosing “Yes” as the default value for the “Prefer original audio” option. If needed, you can switch it back by going to settings. The screen orientation is now correctly remembered and restored when exiting fullscreen on all devices, including Android TVs. Several rotation-related crashes and UI glitches have been fixed. Ghost notifications and random player crashes related to foreground services should be gone.

Download completed or isn’t it?

NewPipe now tries to recover interrupted downloads in more cases when possible, reducing the chance of lost or stuck downloads. Some issues when resuming downloads have also been fixed.

A bug was fixed that caused insufficient permissions to open downloads directly from within the app. Also, after hearing a suggestion from some user we met at FrOSCon, we added a button to remove a download entry in NewPipe without deleting the actual file. This was actually coded on the spot during the conference :-D

SRT subtitles received a bunch of fixes that improve compatibility with various players.

Better usability across the app

You can now enqueue streams directly when sharing them to NewPipe, making it easier to build your play queue from other apps. The play queue UI also received several bug fixes, including one that caused items to glitch when enqueuing new streams. This issue existed for 9 year and is finally resolved!

When viewing bookmarked playlists, its items can now be dragged in both directions in grid mode. Playlist changes are applied directly to the database, preventing confusing or incorrect UI states.

NewPipe can now open and correctly handle on.soundcloud.com links, making it easier to share and open tracks directly from the SoundCloud app or the browser without pasting them into NewPipe’s search box.

Error handling has been cleaned up and deduplicated, resulting in more specific and understandable messages when something goes wrong. On newer Android versions, NewPipe now shows a clear explanation dialog when overlay permissions are needed.

More bug fixes you’ll definitely notice

This release fixes a wide range of issues, including:

• thumbnails for YouTube Shorts not showing up
• the pages for recent and live streams from media.ccc.de are now filled with the correct content
• formatting issues on older Android versions
• and many more!

Meet us at FOSDEM 2026!

NewPipe e.V. is paying for the attendance of some TeamNewPipe members to FOSDEM, a free software conference happening on the 31th of January and 1st of February in Brussels, Belgium. Come to our talk about NewPipe and how it was ported to Salifish OS! Stickers, coasters and flyers included :)

Wanna Contribute?

If you like the app enough to want to make it even better, or you noticed some glaring error that you can’t help but want to fix, you can read our contribution guidelines and do a Fix-It Felix.

Or, if you’re bilingual (or even multilingual), you could help translate the app.

Feature additions to the old codebase have been put on hold for now. We’re pretty swamped as it is, and are working to clear our large (and critical) backlog first. Our next priority is to finish the rewrite of the codebase. We are making progress - slowly, but steadily - and you can help out on that too (and learn modern Android development practices along the way).