I am looking for an alternative to the Youtube app. I heard a lot of recommendations about New Pipe but on F droid there are so many flavors. Which one to pick?
NewPipe: original. no sponsor block or dislikes
Tubular: NewPipe but with sponsor block, dislikes. Relies on upstream updates from NewPipe, so takes slightly longer to fix whenever Google routinely breaks something.
PipePipe: same features as Tubular, and additional accounts/sources such as PeerTube. it is also a hard fork from NewPipe that doesn’t rely on upstream updates and will likely change more over time. also that bug where it stops playback due tk an error and you have to close the video and reopen it happens less often on PipePipe, and can sometimes be fixed just by pressing at again. I use this one as of right now.
Invidious and Piped are both websites that proxy YouTube traffic. they aren’t separate apps, but some apps can use them as a source instead of scraping YouTube directly. Materialous is one that uses Invidious.
There are other apps in FDroid tk choose from too, they usually have a different Ui than NewPipe related ones. I also use Metro List for YouTube Music specifically.
I use NewPipe as my daily driver, but I also have PipePipe istalled for when Google’s bollocks are in twist again and they want to pester the 3rd party apps again. Usuallly one of them if less affected by yhe shenanigans than the other, or else it will be fixed in a couple hours. In the 3 years I’ve been using NewPjpe, the Longest I’ve been without a pipe-app is three days. It only happens once in a while, not more than 3 times a year, I’d guess. And most times it’s fixed within hours or the other app is still working.
Newpipe is the ol reliable. The other forks tend to be maintained for a few months and then you need to go back to newpipe.
As e.g.
PipePipe andTubular are forks of NewPipe, you need the original anyways for the meantime after issues have been fixed until these are adopted by the forks.I’ve had the opposite experience, where NewPipe lagged behind PipePipe in terms of adapting to YouTube-related changes. It had something to do with updating the subscription feed (not that that function is totally reliable on either app).
I also observed this strange issue with NewPipe where if a notification sound interrupts a background-playing video, the audio would stay reduced in volume until the app was brought back to the foreground. A cursory search suggested it was specific to Samsung phones, but when I switched to PipePipe, the issue simply didn’t appear.
Grain of salt: I haven’t used NewPipe since switching in November.
Nice, I recently switched to PipePipe but still have NewPipe (nightly) installed alongside.
Your observations totally make sense, as PipePipe’s website suggests, its development has become independent of NewPipe.
I find PipePipe to be the most reliable of the bunch with the least amount of crashes. Also Piped and Invidious are website-based frontends that are unrelated to the NewPioe project.
Basically, you have NewPipe (the original), Tubular (a soft fork of NewPipe adding Sponsorblock and such), and PipePipe (a hard fork also adding Sponsorblock and allows optionally logging into a Google account for the purpose of cookie authentication).
All of the above are well maintained projects.
We are legion, but all of us pipes secretly admit that Newpipe is our best.
I’ve been enjoying pipepipe for a few months now, started off with new pipe but ended up freezing on me a few times with live streams
I recommend Tubular. It has all the features of NewPipe plus quality of life improvements such as SponsorBlock.
I have both Tubular and NP. I only ever use Tubular.
And you can also install it on TV unlike newpipe. I looked at alternatives, but didn’t like any better than tubular on tv, despite the clunky navigation/controls with remote.
I use SmartTube on my TV. It has a better TV UI imho.
I looked into it when I saw someone else mention it the other day, noped out when I saw the “Important announcement”
That issue has been fixed. The dev has learned from their mistake and taken steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again. It’s fine now.
I started with Tubular but switched over to PipePipe. They are barely distinguishable but PipePipe seems to have a bigger userbase and frequent updates. The reason I use them over NewPipe itself is that they have SponsorBlock integrated, which I view as a requirement for using YouTube.
Otherwise there is also litube. It’s not the same concept and thus less privacy friendly but it might be useful too. This is a webview customized for YouTube with an ad blocker, player to play in background and many other functionalities.
I only have experience with NewPipe but so far it has been positive. I use it every day on both Android and e/OS (Fairphone) without issue.
The times when YT has breaking changes have been resolved by the dev team within a relatively short period (keep in mind they are open-source contributors after all).
Try Grayjay. YouTube plugin (skipps adds), video, twitch, all in 1 manageable app. Open source (to my knowledge), never seen an add.
Grayjay is not open source, but instead is source available. The license restrictions included in the source code do not allow for commercial distribution, and I believe they also don’t allow for forking (I might be wrong on that second point, though).
