Newpipe is an open source alternative YouTube viewer for Android that doesn’t require Google Play services and is very light on resource usage. And as an added features it can play YouTube in the background and even over other apps as a popup window. And here, we love open source alternatives.
Google promotes background playback service as a premium service for select countries with YouTube Red subscription. But Newpipe provides this features for free without subscription. While Newpipe is still in early stages, it does work very well. You can download videos and audio from Youtube videos. The developer plans to support many other streaming services and additionally add other features including bookmarks and history. You can view the complete roadmap in the Github’s Newpipe project page.
Newpipe application is mainly available from two locations; Github and Fossdroid. The Github version is however for debug purposes, and the recommended version is the one from Fossdroid. If you are on Android 4.0.3 and over then you can take joy in using Newpipe as your youtube application.
With the Youtube app, Google Play Service and Youtube API is constantly polling and using up the battery even when you are not using the application on the foreground. With Newpipe, the app is only using the link to gather the required resource to process video and audio through your device.
Here’s the application settings you can control:
If you constantly use Youtube to watch videos, Newpipe is something you should definitely give this a spin. There are other alternative youtube viewer on the play store but they are mostly less featured and ad filled. With the floating browser and background playback it is already a worthy alternative. Unless Google does something to stop the app, Newpipe is definitely a must have application.
