NewPipe, the popular, open-source YouTube client for Android, has been steadily gaining new features and functionalities over the past months. In the last update, the app brought support for YouTube Chapters, several UI improvements, and more. Now the app is getting a fresh update that adds support for Bandcamp, improves the overall user experience, and fixes annoying bugs.

The main highlight of the NewPipe 0.21.0 is support for Bandcamp, an online music distribution platform that allows users to purchase, download, and stream music from their favorite artists. Music purchased from Bandcamp is DRM-free, meaning you have full control over albums and tracks and can freely download and transfer your music wherever you like, unlike Spotify and iTunes which don’t let you access your music outside their apps.

After updating to NewPipe 0.21.0, users can now access the Bandcamp service from the hamburger menu under the dropdown list. Things like fan pages and comments are not supported at the time being, but most of the essential functionalities including streaming, searching, radio, etc are there. Downloading is also supported, something that’s even the official Bandcamp app lacks.

Apart from integrating Bandcamp, the new update also adds support for automatically changing the app theme based on the system theme, the ability to play/pause a video with a hardware space button (with a Bluetooth keyboard or scrcpy), the ability to choose 64Kbps streaming in SoundCloud and so on.

If you're on an older version, you should receive a prompt inside the app asking you to download the NewPipe 0.21.0. Alternatively, you can also download the latest version from F-Droid or NewPipe's GitHub page.

The full changelog for the NewPipe 0.21.0 is as following:

  • New
    • Bandcamp integration
  • Improved
    • Added a setting for the app to follow the device theme. You can also specify if you want your dark theme to be just dark or pitch black.
    • Improved error panel and a new Retry button
    • The app now lets you know if the video/audio you’re unable to open is geo-restricted, age-restricted, private, paid, or only available to premium users.
    • Added a toast to inform the user that a download has started.
    • Added a workaround to enable NewPipe to play HLS tracks on SoundCloud. This essentially means that in addition to the usual 128kbps MP3 stream, you can also choose to play a 64kbps Opus stream!
  • Fixed
    • Fixed the too-small-thumbnails problem that sometimes cropped up (hehe, geddit? “cropped up”) in the video details screen.
    • Fixed the wrong/empty title being shown in the mini player when a series of streams was started in the background player.
    • Fixed the aspect ratio not being stored correctly (Fit/Fill/Zoom). Now this works as users expect it to.
    • Fixed the same error as above, but for Youtube Mix playlists.
    • Fixed the error/infinite loading on the Trending kiosk.
    • Fixed playlist extraction on PeerTube.