The last update contained dozens of changes. Although we provided release candidates for testing to a wider audience, some regressions slipped through. This small update addresses critical bugs introduced in the last release, re-adds the option to hide the thumbnail on the lock screen when playing a stream in background mode, and brings a few optimizations “under the hood”.

New in this version

After changing the complete app work flow and navigation in version 0.20.0, we are still working on improving things and implementing your feedback. Working on the best possible solution which keeps the new UI, but comes with all the features seen in 0.19.x, requires time and sometimes out-of-the-box thinking. We hope to ship some of the old-new buttons and options in the next update. In this version, @XiangRongLin brought back the option to not show thumbnails on the device’s lock screen when playing a stream in the background.

@okan35 worked on making NewPipe UI more intuitive and easier to use: when viewing subscriptions and subscription groups, you can now refresh them by simply pulling down form the top of the stream list.

Bugs, be gone!

Well, you might have noticed: we did not catch all bugs in our last release process. We are sorry for that :( Just kidding, we love introducing regressions and new bugs <3
Otherwise, we might end up having a real life.

@Stypox and @TobiGr fixed a crash on app startup when there was no internet connection. NewPipe’s update check caused this crash. When updating some of its code in the previous release, we forgot to modify the error handling and thus the app crashed fatally when there was a internet connection error. This bug slipped through our release process, because it was specific to NewPipe’s release build. Our built-in version check only searches for updates when the APK is a release signed with the release key. Our debug and release candidate builds are signed with different keys.

When exiting NewPipe and opening other apps, NewPipe is removed from the RAM once it is requested by other apps. Well, NewPipe did not recover from that very well in the last version. @Isira-Seneviratne ensured that all clocks and calendars are set correctly when restoring NewPipe. Having null time is always bad.

@vkay94 enabled the video player to recognize volume or brightness gestures on the whole screen when one is disabled in the settings. YouTube made some small changes to playlists recently. That caused NewPipe to not load more videos. Thanks to @XiangRongLin, you can now see more than 100 videos again.

Nerd talk

That’s it. Almost. Just a small update this time. But let’s briefly sum up, why we still come to more than 2500 additions and 1900 deletions in this release:

• @Stypox took on one of @wb9688’s abandoned PRs and thus shipped many dependency updates.
• various code improvements by @TacoTheDank and @Isira-Seneviratne
• improved performance in local lists (@vkay94)

Where to get this brand-new version

NewPipe notifies you about new versions. You can download them when you press the notification, which will take you to the GitHub release page.

If you use the F-Droid app, it, too, notifies you about updates for NewPipe. Please keep in mind that it can take F-Droid a while to update their repository. If you have problems installing you may need to uninstall NewPipe and then install it afresh. (Make sure to backup data by exporting your database from the Content settings menu.)

If you already installed NewPipe from F-Droid’s repository, to get this version of NewPipe you can do one of the following:

• Wait for them to update (there seem to be problems with that lately, so better)
• Switch to NewPipe’s custom repository by following the directions in the announcement post

Note: If you installed NewPipe from GitHub Releases you will not have to uninstall NewPipe to switch to our custom repo. Just let it update your current version.

Now that you’ve updated, 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.

If you have any other questions feel free to send them in the comments here and someone will reply to you.