NewPipe

NewPipe is a free and open-source media player app for Android devices that is best known as an unofficial YouTube client. It is available in the official F-Droid software repository, in NewPipe's F-Droid repository, or from the GitHub releases page. It is intended to be used as a "privacy-respecting" alternative to the official YouTube app.

Version history
NewPipe was originally released as Version 0.3 on 4 September 2015 and was created by Christian Schabesberger. Notable updates include:


 * Search and play YouTube videos (since 0.3)
 * Download videos and audio (since 0.3)
 * Play only the audio of a video (since 0.4.1)
 * Show similar videos (since 0.6)
 * Support for displaying YouTube Channels (since 0.8.5)
 * A pop-up player (since 0.8.12), (resizable since 0.9.5)
 * Channel subscriptions via RSS (since 0.10.0)
 * Support for displaying sites like the "Trending" section of YouTube (since 0.11.0)
 * SoundCloud support (since 0.11.5)
 * Local playlists and subtitles (since 0.12.0)
 * YouTube livestreaming and ex/import of subscriptions (since 0.13.0)
 * MediaCCC support (since 0.16.0)
 * Display comments (but not comment replies) (since 0.16.0)
 * Resume streams where they were last stopped (since 0.17.0)
 * PeerTube support (since 0.18.0)
 * Basic Android TV support (since 0.19.3)
 * Bandcamp support (since 0.21.0)

Technology
NewPipe does not use the official YouTube API, but instead scrapes the website for video and meta-data such as likes, dislikes, and views. This is done intentionally to decrease the amount of data shared with Google. The web-scraping tool is called the NewPipe-Extractor and is a stand-alone project. It is also used in the free and open-source app SkyTube. Whenever the YouTube back end is updated in a way which makes it incompatible with NewPipe, videos fail to load with "Could Not Decrypt video URL" errors   until a NewPipe update supporting the updated back end is released; however, the incompatibility will repeat when the YouTube back-end is next updated.

In newer versions of the app, the Extractor supports YouTube, SoundCloud, MediaCCC, PeerTube and Bandcamp. However, SoundCloud, MediaCCC, PeerTube and Bandcamp support is in beta, so they may not always work properly. The development team has said that their main focus for further development will be YouTube until version 2.0.0.

Because of the way NewPipe accesses YouTube without using the API or displaying advertisements, it would be in conflict with the terms of service of Google, YouTube's parent company, if it were available on the Google Play Store.

Forks
One of the repeatedly asked feature requests by the users was the inclusion of SponsorBlock, a popular free and open-source technology that would allow the NewPipe app to automatically skip (i.e. block) the sponsored segments of the video. However, this feature request was rejected by the developers of NewPipe, with the primary reason explained as supporting the creators with "ethical advertising". This, however, led to the creation of a fork of NewPipe including support for SponsorBlock.