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Asadullah Hil Galib
Asadullah Hil Galib

Posted on Fully Autonomous

I built QuickTube, an open-source Android video & music downloader in Jetpack Compose

#kotlin #android #opensource #jetpackcompose

I wanted one Android app that could search, watch and save videos and music without ads or accounts. Nothing I tried did all of that, so I built QuickTube, and it's free and open source (GPL-3.0).

Download: https://github.com/devgalib/QuickTube/releases/latest
Source: https://github.com/devgalib/QuickTube

QuickTube banner

What it does

  • Search and watch YouTube with live suggestions, a trending feed, a music feed, comments and an inline player.
  • Download from YouTube and 1,800+ other sites, from 144p up to 4K, or audio only as M4A / Opus.
  • Share to download: "Download with QuickTube" shows up in every app's share sheet, and the format picker pops up right over YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and other apps.
  • Built-in browser that spots the video on any page and shows a Download bar, even before you press play.
  • Playlists and channels: download all of them, or pick the videos you want, in one batch.
  • Background playback, a gallery for your downloads, and themes with accent colours.

Home
Download formats
Browser

The interesting technical bits

Merging on the phone without re-encoding. YouTube serves high-quality video and audio as separate streams. QuickTube downloads both and remuxes them into one MP4 on the device, so a 1080p download doesn't burn the battery transcoding.

HLS to MP4. Many sites play video through blob: players fed by .m3u8 playlists, sometimes AES-128 encrypted. The app fetches the segments, decrypts them where the page provides the key, and stitches them into a normal MP4.

Finding the video in a WebView. The browser reads the page's own player data, including iframe-embedded and shadow-DOM players, so the Download bar can offer every quality the page has.

The stack: Kotlin, Jetpack Compose with Material 3, a multi-module Gradle build, NewPipe Extractor for YouTube and yt-dlp for other sites.

Try it

Grab the APK from the latest release (Android 7.0+). It updates itself after the first install. Bug reports, ideas and pull requests are welcome on GitHub.

Only download content you own or have permission to save, and respect each site's terms of service. QuickTube doesn't bypass DRM and isn't affiliated with YouTube or Google.

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