Team NewPipe has found a new partner. We’re very enthusiastic about the awesome deal we negotiated with them. Read on for more information!

Please beware that the following text was part of this year’s April’s fools joke. Please see @TheAssassin’s reply in the comments for more details on the context of this joke.

Team NewPipe is proud to announce our new partnership with a well-known tech brand we admire a lot: Apple Inc., the authors of revolutionary devices like the Apple III, Apple Newton and Macintosh Portable. Apple stands for innovation and revolution in technology like no other company in the list of the top 10 tech giants.

As many of you might have read recently in the media, Apple plan to launch their own Apple TV+ streaming service. Of course, this service needs nice apps for mobile platforms. The Apple TV+ management is a big fan of NewPipe and sent us an offer we couldn’t deny in order to develop the Android version of Apple TV+ based on our core project: NewPipe!

ApplePipe Logo Proposal

Thanks to the new EU copyright directive, we can legally re-license the entire project retroactively, put it under a commercial license and sell new applications based on it to other companies. We will soon remove the project from GitHub, and with the huge amount of money Apple has transferred to our bank account as an appeal to sign the deal, we hired a team of lawyers who prepared to send DMCA takedown requests to all platforms that might provide the source code again.

The tool that web-scrapes the Internet to recognize such copies and report them to our lawyers will soon be released as free software, of course, as other companies probably have similar issues. Also, we want to give something back, and after evaluation by our management, we can surely tell we can’t generate any revenue by the tool, hence it doesn’t make sense to keep it proprietary for economic reasons either.

Axel Voss is very happy about a positive vote for his copyright directive in 2018.

We would like to thank Internet expert, Springer lobbying advocate and MEP Axel Voss, rapporteur for the new directive, for ignoring the masses of people who expressed their concerns about the directive in the last 3 years to provide companies with powerful tools like the EU copyright laws to make this change happen. Furthermore we thank the EU parliament members who ignored the masses of people who protested in various forms in the last months. To be honest, in the end, the citizens have no idea about the requirements of companies like our newly founded NewPipe AG how to make money. Human rights can really draw back one’s commercial success, and we’re really grateful that the EU now approved a law that limits those rights in favor of huge corporations’ interests.

Part of our deal is that some of our core maintainers receive management positions at Apple. Christian Schabesberger will become the new CTO of Apple TV+’s client development department. Tobias Groza was offered the position of COO, but he denied, as he was offered a more lucrative position by our competitor Netflix. We wish him best luck with his new job, and thank him for all his contributions. I am working as backend development consultant part-time (I’m not greedy enough to work full-time, and will surely enjoy my future 6-days-per-month contract). @karyogamy and a few other developers were hired as senior software engineers.

We would like to express our appreciation to the hundreds of contributors who invested their free time into translating, developing or otherwise improving NewPipe. These people allowed us to partner with Apple, and we do feel a little guilty that we take NewPipe off GitHub and ignore our old license’s terms.

However, money is more important, and therefore: So long, and thanks for all the fish!