NewPipe is a free and open-source Android front-end for YouTube, YouTube Music, SoundCloud, PeerTube, Bandcamp and media.ccc.de, developed by the volunteer group Team NewPipe and, since 2022, financially and organizationally supported by NewPipe e.V., a registered non-profit association in Germany. The README states no account on any service is needed, that the app uses no proprietary libraries such as Google Play Services, and that it fetches content by parsing service websites or internal APIs rather than the official YouTube API; subscriptions, playlists and history are stored on the device. The project's privacy policy names an individual person responsible (in Germany), states that data is not shared with third parties, and documents an opt-in crash-report flow that composes a JSON e-mail the user can inspect before sending to a self-hosted Sentry instance. Caveats: because it is a client, the video providers still see the user's IP address and requests (Privacy Guides warns about this), YouTube's anti-bot measures can block or break the app, it is distributed outside Google Play, and a High-severity deserialization vulnerability in backup import (CVE-2024-32876) was disclosed by the maintainers and fixed in 0.27.0. No breach, regulatory action, or third-party audit was found.
TRACK RECORD
1 ENFORCEMENT ACTION
[2024-04-24]
The U.S. National Vulnerability Database records the same issue as CVE-2024-32876 (published April 24, 2024, source GitHub), confirming the affected range 0.13.4 to 0.26.1 and the fix in 0.27.0; no data breach, regulatory action, or third-party security audit of NewPipe was found in this research.
NewPipe's privacy policy describes its crash-report system as opt-in: when the app crashes the user is shown a summary and may choose to send full details, which NewPipe composes as a human-readable JSON e-mail through the device's mail client (sender e-mail, error type, requested URL, app language, time, app version, OS version, stacktrace); users can remove or anonymize fields before sending, and the policy concedes it cannot guarantee no personal data ends up in reports by accident.
The NewPipe website's Extended Privacy section states the app uses no proprietary Google APIs, only sends the information required to obtain video and channel details, lets the user decide what information is kept, and stores everything offline on the device.
NewPipe's README states the app fetches data from official APIs where possible and otherwise parses the service website or uses an internal API, so no account on any service is required, and that neither the app nor its Extractor use proprietary libraries or frameworks such as Google Play Services.
NewPipe's privacy policy names a single individual, Christian Schabesberger, with a postal address in Germany and a contact e-mail as the person responsible for the project's data processing under the GDPR and the German BDSG, and states all data is stored in a German datacenter.
NewPipe's repository publishes the app's complete source code under the GNU General Public License version 3, so the running code can be inspected, audited and forked rather than trusted on the operator's description alone.
NewPipe e.V. describes itself as a non-profit association founded in Germany in 2022, mostly by TeamNewPipe members, governed directly by its members through at least one annual assembly; it lists NewPipe as a supported project, funding hired part-time contractors, communication and website infrastructure, and trademark registration.
NewPipe's FAQ states the app only sends external servers the information needed to access content such as videos or search results, and that the developers will not implement any login or authentication (including posting YouTube comments) because signing in would let the service track the user.
NewPipe's privacy policy states the project will not share any of the data it processes (crash reports, blog comments, anonymized web logs) with third parties; data is stored on a project-administered, full-disk-encrypted dedicated server in a German datacenter to which neither the hosting provider nor any other third party has access, with backups kept up to six months.
Privacy Guides lists NewPipe (Android) among its recommended YouTube frontends under criteria requiring open-source, self-hostable software that provides basic functionality to anonymous users, and notes subscriptions and playlists are saved locally; the listing carries an explicit warning that the user's IP address remains visible to the video providers NewPipe connects to.
The U.S. National Vulnerability Database records the same issue as CVE-2024-32876 (published April 24, 2024, source GitHub), confirming the affected range 0.13.4 to 0.26.1 and the fix in 0.27.0; no data breach, regulatory action, or third-party security audit of NewPipe was found in this research.
On April 24, 2024 the NewPipe maintainers published GitHub Security Advisory GHSA-wxrm-jhpf-vp6v (severity High): importing a backup file from an untrusted source could result in arbitrary code execution in versions 0.13.4 through 0.26.1 because backups were deserialized with Java's Object Serialization Stream Protocol; version 0.27.0 restricted deserializable classes, moved new backups to JSON and warns users on legacy imports. Exploitation required persuading a user to import a malicious backup.
The F-Droid listing states NewPipe uses no Google framework libraries and not the YouTube API, only parsing the website, and that no YouTube account is needed; F-Droid builds the app from source and publishes its full Android permission list (network, foreground services, notifications, shared storage, run at startup, appear on top, prevent sleeping) with no advertising or analytics SDK components, while flagging an anti-feature that the app depends on the non-free YouTube service.
NewPipe's FAQ states the app deliberately does not use the official YouTube API because doing so requires an API key with restrictions and would give YouTube more ways to track the user's viewing; instead the NewPipe Extractor parses YouTube web pages. The same page notes YouTube's anti-bot measures can temporarily block a user's IP address, a functional fragility inherent to the unofficial-scraping design.