Why is there a new release only six days after the previous one? Well, don’t expect anything big… just a few adjustments to the previous version and some long-awaited bugfixes for lists! That’s what you would expect from a point release, according to semantic versioning, but we have never been that good at choosing release numbers. Sorry about that.

Before starting with the changelog, let us dedicate a brief moment to the suffering of Ukrainian people. We sincerely hope this cruel war will come to an end soon and your freedom will be respected.

Fixed

• Lists on big screens might finally work as expected! Now if the initially loaded items do not fill the whole screen, NewPipe will load another chunk of them, instead of showing a loading indicator forever. This long-awaited fix was brought to you by none other than our hero from the last release, @litetex. In the same pull request they also fixed some recurring crashes when scrolling through lists, caused by a misuse of the nasty Android RecyclerView.

  For those of you wondering, a RecyclerView is a special view component that allows showing many items of the same type in a list without overloading the system with too many views at the same time. It does so by binding only the items visible on the screen to the corresponding view component (for example a stream info item view). When one such view is moved out on one side of the screen, it is recycled to be used again, once needed on the opposite side. The random crash that was fixed here was caused by a piece of code that every now and then tried to bind the same view component to multiple items at the same time, which is obviously not possible. Hence the crash. Sorry for this out-of-section nerd talk, we just want to show you how hard it was to track this issue down.

• @Stypox (I, as the blog author, declare freedom from any conflict of interest) solved the graphical problem with the newly-introduced fast-forward/rewind arc not underlaying the system UI when playing in the fullscreen player. This was particularly visible when controls were hidden, since a non-animated border was shown around the animated arc. The blog post author would like to point out here what a great contributor @Stypox is.

• Talking about system borders… users that have a phone with cutouts (you know, those little notches that phone manufacturers have really grown to love lately) might have noticed a misplaced player in the previous version. It was caused by an attempt to improve watching videos in multi-window mode, that evidently went wrong. This change, originally made by @Cheechaii, was reverted by @litetex. Thanks to both!

Nerd Talk

• The error catching library, ACRA, was updated by the master of libraries, @TacoTheDank. Thank you!

• @litetex improved the image minimizer GitHub action they introduced a couple of weeks ago to reduce the image size of (phone) screenshots included in issue bodies and comments.

• @Stypox beat @TobiGr on time in incrementing Android’s compileSdk from 30 (Android 11) to 31 (Android 12). This will allow updating more libraries to their newest versions in the future.

• @Stypox refactored a couple of lines in the big (we are talking BIG. Really, way too BIG) Player class. They would also like to point out that the whole team is quite committed to improving the messed-up player, which likes to spit out nasty bugs every once in a while due to its complexity. In a very distant future, expressions such as “the player is a hot pile of garbage” and “the code is a spaghetti monster of doom” might finally disappear! This is another step towards that future.

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.