need urgent update

[abdullah-amr0]

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What is/are your question(s)?

Hi NewPipe Team,

First of all, thank you so much for creating and maintaining NewPipe. Your commitment to privacy, an ad-free experience, and open-source software is deeply appreciated by the entire community.

I’m reaching out with a few thoughts and suggestions from a user’s perspective that I believe could make the app even more enjoyable for everyday use:

1. Modernizing the UI, UX & Navigation Transitions

While NewPipe’s simplicity is great, the interface and animations can sometimes feel a bit dated compared to modern video apps (such as the clean, fluid experience of YouTube on iOS).

Edge-to-edge video feeds with clear channel avatars and metadata.
Smooth push/pop slide transitions instead of abrupt fades when navigating between screens and channels.
A unified horizontal action bar for quick actions (Download, Background, Popup, Playlist, Share).

(A quick tip for the team: modern AI coding assistants like Claude inside tools like Antigravity, Cursor, or Codex have gotten remarkably good at handling large-scale Android UI/layout modernization and animation overhauls very quickly, which could save you a lot of tedious manual refactoring.)

2. Video Playback Support While Connected to a VPN

Many privacy-conscious users keep a VPN enabled on their phones 24/7. Currently, NewPipe frequently fails to play videos (or encounters HTTP 403 Forbidden / BotGuard token errors) when connected through commercial VPNs because YouTube aggressively flags shared datacenter IP ranges.

Having built-in resilience—such as graceful fallbacks when BotGuard challenges fail, retrying POST stream requests as GET when edge nodes reject them, or auto-flushing stale connection pools when switching networks—would make a world of difference for users on VPNs.

Thank you again for all your dedication, hard work, and for keeping this project alive and free for everyone. I would love to hear your thoughts on these ideas whenever you have a moment.

Warm regards,
Abdullah

Additional information

No response

[Mesum-Hussain]

I was literally here to start this discussion.

I feel like we can do much better job designing NewPipe's UI/UX.

If the mainteners are fine with it, I can make a quick jetpack compose UI prototype so that we can immediately test it on our devices and get a feel of the experience.

If everything is perfect, we can go about integrating it with the NewPipe Extracter.