NewPipe is a popular third-party Android app for watching videos on YouTube and media on a selection of other sites, including Soundcloud. The latest release, NewPipe 0.25.2 adds support for accessing multiple audio tracks on YouTube among other changes.

Back in 2022, I declared that NewPipe is the better YouTube client for Android. It is free to use, without any form of advertisement, and packed with additional features. While it lacks some features of the YouTube client, notably features such as syncing data between devices using a Google account or using other account-requiring features such as leaving comments on YouTube, it supports the bulk of features that users require.

NewPipe is an open source application that does not use the YouTube API or Google Play services. The app runs on devices therefore that come without any of these Google services installed.

NewPipe 0.25.2

NewPipe is available via F-Droid and the official website of the project. Users who installed NewPipe from GitHub are advised to create a backup before they update the app to the latest version.

This is done by opening NewPipe, selecting Menu  > Settings > Content > Export database. Select a save location and activate the "save" button to store the data on the device. You may then use the import database option under the same menu to import the data again, should it not be available immediately.

The big new feature in NewPipe 0.25.2 is support for multiple audio tracks. The feature is only available for large publishers on YouTube at the time of writing. It allows you to switch the audio track to another language.

You may check out this video to see how it works.

Tap on the YouTube video in NewPipe to display additional settings. The original language of the video is displayed there, if it supports multiple audio tracks. Tap on the language to get a list of other languages that are supported. Select any of those to play the video in that language instead.

The blog post on the official website lists other changes and improvements. Many of these are under-the-hood improvements. One improvement lifts the throttling of downloads on YouTube, which is a welcome change for users who prefer to watch videos offline.

You may also check out our reviews of new YouTube extensions. There is FastStream, which replaces YouTube's default video player with a custom one, and Ad Speedup, which skips and fast forwards ads on YouTube.

Now You: do you watch videos on YouTube?