YouTube is one stop entertainment and information hub for millions of people. It got all type of content on it for almost everyone. One side of YouTube is that you get all quality content on it (if you ignore the bullshit) as well as a hell lot of advertisements with every YouTube video. These are the most annoying type of ads that pop ups while watching videos and they almost ruins the video watching experience. Most people don't know how to get rid of them because all android phones comes with YouTube app preinstalled and you have to live with that because people don't bother to find how to get rid of advertisements from it, most people are okay with it, not everyone is a geek. Well, you can also purchase youtube premium to get rid of ads but everybody can afford that on monthly basis.
Of course you can get rid of YouTube advertisements on web version of YouTube by using an adblocker like Adblock plus or uBlock origin but it is very hard to get rid of advertisement from the official android app. These adblockers can not block inside the youtube app. This is why apps like NewPipe exists. It can do more than just ad blocking.
NewPipe is an open source and free YouTube client for Android. The main purpose of it is to get rid of various kind of restrictions that the official YouTube app puts on users. The recent example of such restriction is limiting the video resolution to 480p in India. This is done by YouTube to ease the stress on its servers because a there are millions of people are staying on home due to corona pandemic and the 21 day lockdown by government. This is all fine but restricting users to just watch videos in 480p is not because users can not switch to higher resolution. there is no option above 480p. With NewPipe such restriction can be bypassed by using NewPipe no matter which country you live in.
First I am going to list all the features that NewPipe offers then I will tell about some things that NewPipe can not do as opposite to official YouTube app.
Downloads -
This is not available to download from Google Play Store because it violates some google play store policies. Same goes for all the YouTube clients on the internet.
1. Download from Fdroid Store
2. Download from official GitHub repo
2. Direct apk link to latest version (Fdroid)
Features of NewPipe -
- Small and lighweight app.
- Video downloads - Choose between video, audio or captions download, select the most suitable file format,download the resolution you need.
- No proprietary Google APIs, it only send information which is required to get the video and channels.
- All information like search history and favorites is stored on your device locally.
- Play in background - An advance resizable picture in picture mode. You can also just play music of video in background, good for song playlists.
- Subscribe to channel with just one click. Easily import and export your local subscriptions from other devices.
- Bookmarks - Create your own playlist, import playlists, mark video as favorites and import all this data on other device to save time.
- Search suggestion and youtube watching history for easy access to what you have watched earlier.
- It is free, opensource and have 63 language support, updates are guaranteed if something breaks.
oh, if you like to read the often not so interesting and hate filled YouTube comments, this app can do that too.
All are these are the nice features which you sure want to try.
Now lets talk about the things that you can not do with this. The first one is that you can not login with you YouTube/Google account in this app. This means that all your favorites and playlist won't appear in this client magically. The one motto of this app is to keep it as google-less as possible. Some folks out there really don't want to be tracked about what you watch and then target you with specific ads and collect all kind of personal identifiable information about you.
Second things is that it can not provide you MP3 files of a video because YouTube does not provide MP3 files which could be downloaded directly. Other sound format that it provide for downloading can be easily played in almost all music player which you can find on play store.
There might be some things that you may miss from while using this client but they are not something you can not live without. Considering all the good features it provides, it is my personal on the go app for accessing YouTube.
You can find more information about it on the official NewPipe website and check out its source code on GitHub.
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