UDownload

The gap

SongTube was a beloved Flutter app — a NewPipe-powered video browser and downloader with thousands of GitHub stars and forks — and it had been abandoned for about two years. A client wanted something like it, and the community still asked for it constantly. So instead of cloning a dead app, I rebuilt the idea on a foundation I could actually maintain — including the piece SongTube depended on that no longer existed in good shape for Dart.

Porting NewPipe to Dart

UDownload runs on newpipeextractor_dart — my Dart port of NewPipe Extractor — so the whole app needs no API key and no official client. The extractor does the real work: SearchExtractor.searchYoutube (and a Music mode), TrendingExtractor for the home feed and its kiosks, plus channels, playlists, related videos, comments and chapter segments — each call wrapped in a 60-second timeout. Because NewPipe Extractor is GPL-3, the port and the app are too; the license is inherited, not bolted on.

A real player, not a webview

Wrapping playback in a webview is the lazy path and it always feels wrong. UDownload drives a native Android ExoPlayer through a platform channel — native_video_player/method_* for commands, an event channel for position, duration and buffering state. That buys real controls: quality switching, playback speed, seeking, volume, source swaps between separate video/audio streams, and proper picture-in-picture over its own channel. Video should feel native, so it is.

Downloads from what the extractor exposes

Downloading means resolving streams, not scraping a page. The extractor returns video-only, muxed video, and audio-only tracks; the app surfaces a quality picker (1080p, 128 kbps, … (muxed)) and hands the chosen stream to the native layer to fetch — audio-only saves included, for the people who only ever wanted the music SongTube gave them.

Why open source, why GPL-3

Two reasons. First, GPL-3 isn’t a choice here — it’s what building on NewPipe Extractor requires, and I’d rather honour that cleanly than fight it. Second, the people still asking “is there a SongTube replacement?” deserve a real answer they can run themselves, so the whole thing is on GitHub. It stays free with AppLovin ads and OneSignal for updates; the NOTICE file is explicit that those proprietary SDKs sit outside the GPL core.

Honest status

UDownload was published only days ago — no stars or installs to point at yet, and I’d rather say that than dress it up. What’s solid is the foundation: a maintained Dart NewPipe port, a native player, and a license that lets it outlive me the way SongTube couldn’t.