NewPipe — the best FOSS
1 min readApr 9, 2021
NewPipe is a free and open-source Android application for browsing & watching YouTube. In my opinion, NewPipe is a perfect case-study in why free & open source software is great and how our values differ from proprietary software in important ways.
NewPipe has many features which are deliberately omitted from the proprietary app, such as:
- No advertisement
- playing any videos in the background
- Downloading videos( or their audio tracks alone) to play offline
- playing videos in a pop-up player
- subscribing to channels without a youtube account
- importing and exporting subscriptions
- showing subscriptions in chronological order
- it support streaming services other than youtube (like Soundcloud, media.ccc.de, Framatube, Bandcamp)
On top of that, YouTube is constantly gathering data about you and making decisions which put their interests ahead of yours.
The proprietary app is exploitative of users, and NewPipe is empowering users.
If you want to know more about newpipe -> https://newpipe.net/
