You want another update? We have another update. Welcome to version 0.21.3, where nothing extraordinarily exciting happened. But hey, you can move NewPipe to your SD card now, and you get some quality of life changes as well as bug fixes, which is also nice, isn’t it? So take a relaxing cup of tea and read through this blog post about relaxing changes. Relax. Deep breaths. Hot tea. And let’s guide you through the changes.

New

• @fynngodau added the first page of Bandcamp comments. This means a maximum of 3 comments will be shown per song. No further comments. (… for now?)

• @mhmdanas enabled NewPipe to be installed on external storage. Those with SD cards, please test it out and tell us if everything works fine!

Improved

• @TiA4f8R replaced the SoundCloud client_id validity check with a faster and more lightweight method.

• Several PeerTube instances switched to providing only HLS streams after this feature was added to PeerTube. This completely broke opening such videos in NewPipe. A workaround was added by @TobiGr. HLS videos work now, and will work even better once they are properly implemented in the player (seeking in such videos is still buggy). So basically, watching videos from PeerTube instances like TILvids is possible again. Woohoo!

• The backup export and import location of NewPipe are now persistent. This means when you select a location once, the file picker will show you the last folder you picked the next time onwards, instead of having you navigate to that folder every time. Thank you @ATofighi for implementing this incredibly useful quality-of-life fix!

• @mhmdanas removed several unnecessary newlines from the files containing translations for the app. Begone, newlines! You are not welcome in these hallowed pipes.

Fixed

• @TechComet fixed the extraction of video information when the video is age-restricted, or is not available for some reason.

• @TiA4f8R fixed the extraction of mobile SoundCloud URLs.

• @subraizada3 fixed a bug where the download toast was shown a second time if you tried to download the exact same thing twice, even though instead of starting a duplicate download, NewPipe shows a confirmation dialog asking if you want to generate a unique name or cancel the second download. A confirmation dialog is clearly not the same thing as a download, and now the app knows that as well.

• @TobiGr noticed that the app was sending a reCAPTCHA cookie with every request, instead of only when it needed to. The empty reCAPTCHA cookies might have caused problems for a few people. This is fixed now.

• While investigating a playback performance issue, @Redirion discovered that the player was using a cache size that was below the minimum value recommended by ExoPlayer. This could have been causing performance issues for some users, but it is fixed now. If you were one of those affected, please test this release and see if playback is smooth again for you.

• @ix5 fixed a bug where deleting several downloads from within Newpipe one after the other created multiple “Undo” snackbars (that black bar at the bottom) which kept piling up, taking a long while to dismiss on their own. Newer snackbars now correctly replace older ones, so only the last snackbar is left to dismiss.

• There was a regression in the last version: the video always paused immediately upon starting after tapping the thumbnail, and every video consequently needed an extra tap to play. This was the case even if autoplay was enabled. Now it doesn’t pause needlessly again, all thanks to @litetex.

• Also in the last version, we updated the ExoPlayer library, which handles playing all media in NewPipe. With that update, ExoPlayer tried to be smarter about what decoder to choose on the device, and that resulted in some people getting stuttering videos, since it chose the wrong decoder. So we (read: @Redirion) downgraded the library (deja vu in reverse!?), and will keep track of development to see if we can upgrade it again later.

• @sauravrao637 fixed a crash when trying to delete an object from a list when that object isn’t actually there in said list.

• Now you can successfully go back from the Error Report page when tapping the Back button in the top bar (aka action bar). Previously, the button was there, but it didn’t do anything. Credit for that change goes to @ATofighi.

Nerd Talk

• @TobiGr fixed a failing YouTube test.

• @sauravrao637 replaced an if-else block with a switch statement in the error activity code, and also suppressed a false warning in Android Studio for that statement.

• @Isira-Seneviratne added an extension function to simplify some code.

• @mhmdanas tweaked unrelated code snippets here and there to fix a bunch of warnings.

• @TacoTheDank updated actions/setup-java for Github Actions to v2.

• Do you remember that @Redirion did something close to black magic with media tunneling in the last release? Well, he did it again. Now everyone using a debug build of NewPipe can switch media tunneling off. That makes it much easier to figure out if a bug is related to this particular feature.

• @mhmdanas made three small changes to the code, which didn’t change functionality, but made it look cleaner. Yay for code cleanup!

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 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.