Have you fully read the last blog post and remember the first paragraph in the Whats New section? Do you not and you can’t care less? Well, I don’t care either, I have a story for both of you…

Another release???

Yes, another release. The developers told me they are deeply sorry. And now it is on me to try to explain why you have to update (and I have to write a blogpost…) again.

The build four days ago was a preparation for March, where YouTube shuts down the way NewPipe used to access their website. The release happened as quickly as possible in order to get the update out in time to F-Droid users, since NewPipe basically faces a wait-time of a week for each update.

Now, as you can imagine, basically every part of the app relies in one way or another on a properly parsed YouTube site. After pushing out the update and ensuring in advance that basic functionalities do work with the new way of accessing YouTube, users and developers where quick to realize that not everything works as well as it used to. So the NewPipe team decided to push out a hotfix for the hotfix, addressing these issues.

What changes

A lot. All of the entries in the list fix issues not happening in 0.18.4. We have two general improvements though. @Stypox improved the playback. You are already able to increase the tempo and pitch, and can unlink those settings. So far, you would need to unlink them in every video. Now, NewPipe remembers what you selected, so you can watch every video as linked or unlinked as you like. If you happen to have one of those fancy fullscreen smartphones with a notch, you can thank @moneytoo, he made NewPipe support them in fullscreen properly. Now, to the list of fixes, you will love it:

• Proper rounding of number of subscribers, with one instead of zero decimals
• Trending page not containing everything, not only three elements. To be honest, who is actually watching those? Anyway, if you are, you can without any restrictions now. Lucky you.
• Correctly parse special links, not so special anymore, those links
• Pictures of certain channels weren’t displayed
• YouTube Music playlists work again (yay music)
• Some channels don’t have videos tabs, which doesn’t break NewPipe anymore (take that, weird channels)
• Video titles with @ work again
• # in descriptions are supported again
• Channel descriptions work again
• 0 subscribers on channels - 0 broken NewPipes. At least now
• Fix channels with multiple views on Videos tab
• Thumbnail URLs starting with // work again
• All search queries which should return something will return something
• Correctly display Network error when a network error happened instead of a general crash error (so much error)
• using less data, based on a new way of accessing only the wanted information instead of the whole webpage. Not really a bugfix but worth a mention

Those people where involved in the fixes, some more, some less: @wb9688, @mauriciocolli @B0pol, @gzsombor, @TobiGr and @Stypox. Thanks to all of them, and thanks to people reporting the issues!

Where to get the latest version

NewPipe notifies you about new versions, you can download them when you press the notification. An alternative is the Github release page. If you use the F-Droid app, it notifies you as well about an update for NewPipe - please keep in mind that it can take F-Droid a while to update their repository.

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.