Hello, did you order a hot fix update? Because we have one here, it is steaming and ready.

YouTube broke.

We are very sorry about this, but YouTube changed a parameter in their video player decryption and the code we created to decrypt the input from YouTube broke. @AbduAmeen created a fix together with @SebastianSong, and @TobiGr worked with them to get it merged in the Extractor. Thanks to all three of them for doing this so quickly.

Quick note for the next time this happens

We, as every development team, feel great knowing our app is used by many people. We mostly notice this when it breaks in a major way, of course. This time it was a bit too much though. We received 74 comments in 10 hours (!) under the one thread for this issue, 18 duplicate threads (!!) of this same issue and quite some comments on various (!!!) blog posts regarding NewPipe being broken.

The problem with having that many comments is that the development team needs specific information to figure out the cause of the issue. If so many messages are sent to us, we are potentially missing the one important hint to find the cause. This means it slows down the development of the fix, since every single message might need to be checked and new ones keep coming in when they aren’t needed.

It would be great if you can check the GitHub issues the next time NewPipe breaks (the comment section is not the way to report issues) and see if one already exists for the broken thing before creating a new one. And a big thanks to everyone who didn’t contribute to this madness, you are the real heroes in this storm <3.

Closing note

This is the only change in this release, we have loads of new changes coming up, stay tuned for them. Until then, have a lovely time!

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 Releases 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 the update, you may need to uninstall NewPipe and then install it afresh. (Make sure to backup data by exporting your database from the Settings > Content 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
• 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. Make sure you back up your data as mentioned in the warning at the top of the FAQ page!

Now that you’ve (hopefully) 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 post them in the comments here and someone will reply to you. Also, thanks for reading it till the end! We put quite some time into these blog posts.