LibreTube

LibreTube is an alternative front end for YouTube. It needs no YouTube account and no Google services on your phone, and its developers’ stated aim is to send only the minimum data needed to work.

What it does

From the project’s feature list:

• Subscriptions, including subscription groups, and your own playlists and playlist bookmarks.
• Watch and search history.
• Downloads and background playback.
• SponsorBlock to skip sponsored segments, Return YouTube Dislike for dislike counts, and DeArrow, which replaces clickbait titles and thumbnails with community-submitted ones.

Where it gets videos from

LibreTube was built as an app for Piped, an alternative YouTube front end that fetches content on your behalf; its early README said it “proxies all requests via Piped”. A fresh install of version 32.1 works differently. Under Settings › Instance › Mode of operation there are three ways it can work, and the code picks one in this order:

• Full local mode, on by default: “Directly fetch everything from YouTube, without using Piped.” It does this with NewPipe’s extractor library, which is bundled in the APK.
• Local stream extraction, also on by default but used only if you turn full local mode off: Piped supplies lists and video details, and your phone fetches the video streams itself.
• Piped only: everything goes through a Piped server, pipedapi.kavin.rocks unless you pick another.

Two related switches are on by default as well. Your subscription feed is built on the phone, which the app warns “may be significantly slower”. And dislike counts are fetched for each video you open: the setting says it asks returnyoutubedislikeapi.com directly, but the code in 32.1 sends the video’s ID to ryd-proxy.kavin.rocks, on the same domain as the default Piped server. Turning off Local Return Youtube Dislike extractor stops that request, and the dislike counts with it.

Which mode is more private is a trade-off, not a ranking. In full local mode your phone talks to YouTube directly, so YouTube sees your IP address, as it does with NewPipe. Through Piped, the Piped server makes those requests for you, so YouTube sees the server instead, and whoever runs that server sees what you ask for. A Piped account is optional; it is what syncs subscriptions and playlists between devices.

What we found in the APK

• No native code. The same 9.3 MB file runs on any CPU. It needs Android 8.0 or later.
• Libraries: NewPipe’s extractor (about 300 classes in the APK), AndroidX Media3 for playback, Coil for images, Room for the local database and OkHttp for network requests. The extractor is why the code also contains SoundCloud, Bandcamp and media.ccc.de addresses, which LibreTube itself doesn’t offer.
• Servers named in the code, besides YouTube’s own: pipedapi.kavin.rocks (the default Piped server), piped.video (offered when you share a link), sponsor.ajay.app (SponsorBlock), dearrow-thumb.ajay.app (DeArrow), ryd-proxy.kavin.rocks (dislike counts, used by default; see above) and api.github.com (update checks). An address in the code doesn’t mean the app contacts it; most are used only when the matching feature or setting is on.
• Update checks are off by default. The Check updates automatically switch starts off, so the app asks GitHub only when you check yourself.
• No tracker or crash-reporting library turned up in our scan of the code.

Compared with NewPipe, PipePipe and Tubular

All four play YouTube without a Google account, and this site hosts all four. From the files we measured:

Overlay means the app asks for permission to draw over other apps; ACRA means the ACRA crash-reporting library is in its code. LibreTube asks for 9 permissions and the other three for 11 each, and all three of them request drawing over other apps and writing to shared storage, which LibreTube doesn’t. Its small-window player uses Android’s built-in picture-in-picture mode instead, which its manifest declares and which needs no such permission. Tubular’s source repository has been archived, which F-Droid marks as SourceArchived.

Good to know

• F-Droid flags it NonFreeNet, because it relies on YouTube.
• Nightly builds of LibreTube exist on GitHub, but the project warns they are less stable. The file here is a regular release.

About this file

This copy comes from F-Droid, which built it from the source code and signed it with its own key. It won’t install over a LibreTube copy from GitHub or IzzyOnDroid (or the other way round) without uninstalling first, because the signatures differ.

Flagged by F-Droid:

• NonFreeNet: Relies on or promotes a proprietary network service.

Versions currently kept in the F-Droid repository. We host and check only the newest one. Full changelog.