Keep on streaming with a fresh update to NewPipe. This one comes with a lot of bug fixes, improvements and more features. This also fixes an error when trying to watch YouTube videos.

Testers needed

We need testers for new versions of NewPipe! If you have a KitKat, Android TV, or “battery optimized” device, please add yourself to the relevant section of the testers wiki page and you will be mentioned when you are needed.

Additions

Thanks to @B0pol, there is now support for SoundCloud comments! Go see if they recommend any similar music to your favorite track! He also added PeerTube playlist support.

There is now a Restricted Mode setting for YouTube. This will help keep some of the weird stuff on YouTube away. Thanks, @vnagel!

Support for vnd.youtube://ID links was added by @Stypox, so when sharing from other apps the links will work in NewPipe.

@wb9688 added support for YouTube’s learning playlists, so it should be easier to learn new subjects!

In PeerTube, viewing the parent channel of a channel is now possible when watching a video of the sub-channel. This allows you to navigate easily to the channel that is related to the channel whose video you are watching. That’s a lot of channels, so thanks @Royosef.

Bug fixes

The bug where trying to open a video made a “Could not get any stream” error appear was fixed by @wb9688 in the extractor.

He also fixed sending e-mails from the crash reporter, so next time you get a crash and choose to report it via e-mail, the error will be in the contents! This change will help errors get noticed by the developers faster.

The “open in browser” button now actually opens the link in your default browser instead of giving an option of what to open it with. That was fixed by @B0pol.

Another contribution by @wb9688 was to stop a freeze that happened when pressing “Download” on a PeerTube video.

@B0pol fixed some crashes related to different languages being set. Hindi, Ukrainian, and Polish speakers don’t need to worry about NewPipe crashing due to their language anymore.

Improvements

Speaking of translations, the debug settings (for if you are running a test build of NewPipe) are now translateable. Help out by translating through Weblate. Thank you, @wb9688 for helping people around the world use NewPipe!

The extractor version was updated by @Stypox, bringing better performance. The extractor release notes better explain this.

@B0pol made YouTube searches able to be corrected in case of a typo.

NewPipe now uses vector drawables instead of PNGs for the icons in the app. This decreased the app size in general and gave a good chance to upgrade some libraries from legacy versions to new ones. Great work, @Stypox! Icons should now scale very well.

Some buttons now have their colors set based on what service you are using. Thanks for the theming help, @B0pol.

Gesture controls now don’t interfere with the status bar or navigation bar, which should stop you from accidentally changing the volume or brightness when checking notifications. This was the first contribution of @AioiLight!

If any of you use Kodi and were wondering why the button showed up when it didn’t work, thank @Stypox for making the button for Kore only appear on the supported services (YouTube and SoundCloud).

Under the hood

This section is for internal changes with this release. These aim to make the lives of the developers a little bit easier. Ktlint, a linter for Kotlin, was added. This essentially checks for errors in the code and ensures that the way things are formatted are the same. Now there won’t be a problem about using spaces or tabs to indent, so thank you, @wb9688! :)

Also upgraded were a bunch of dependencies NewPipe uses, done by @wb9688. The target SDK was upgraded to API level 29 (Android 10), LeakCanary was updated for debug builds, the crash reporter was updated, and many more miscellaneous libraries were brought to the present.

Conclusion + internal news

There are some issues with 0.19.4 regarding the file picker and other things, so it is possible that a 0.19.5 will be coming out shortly to address these problems. Please also remember to be nice to the developers of NewPipe! There have been some interesting comments from a small minority of people using foul language.

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. If you have problems installing you may need to uninstall NewPipe then reinstall (make sure to backup data).

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.