LiveTube

A minimal Android YouTube player built for podcasts: add channels and playlists to a Library, tap any video, and keep listening with the screen off — or switch to audio-only to save data and battery.

Paste a link  →  Play  →  Close your phone →  keeps playing

Features

• Library — save channels and playlists with a +; browse them by title + thumbnail
• Pagination — infinite scroll through a channel/playlist feed, or Load all to cache every page
• Audio-only mode — plays just the audio stream (no video) to save bandwidth and battery. Default on.
• Background playback — a Media3 foreground service keeps playing with the screen off, with a media notification (play / pause / stop) and lock-screen media controls
• Video downloads — save the currently playing or pasted YouTube video to the device's Downloads folder using Android's system download manager
• Auto-play next — optional toggle to keep playing through a channel/playlist queue
• Never AI-dubbed — when a video has multi-language AI dubbing, only the original language audio track is played
• Live streams — plays YouTube live streams, with periodic refresh so the URL doesn't expire
• Direct media URLs — the Player tab also accepts raw podcast/audio URLs

Requirements

• Android 8.0+ (API 26+); works best on Android 10+
• A YouTube link to start with :)

Install

Download the latest app-release.apk from the Releases page, allow "Install unknown apps" for your browser/download manager, and open the APK.

On first launch, grant the notification permission so the playback notification shows up. Android 8 and 9 also ask for legacy storage permission the first time you save a video to Downloads.

Build from source

# JDK 17
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-17-openjdk   # path depends on your system
./gradlew assembleRelease

The signed release APK is produced at app/build/outputs/apk/release/app-release.apk.

Signing: signing secrets are not in this repository (see .gitignore). To produce a release build locally you need your own keystore with a keystore.properties file at the repo root:

storeFile=keystore/livetube.jks
storePassword=<password>
keyAlias=<alias>
keyPassword=<password>

Keep that keystore backed up — upgrading an installed app requires signing with the same key.

Manual GitHub releases

The repository includes a Build and Release APK GitHub Action that you can start manually from the Actions tab. It builds the signed release APK, verifies its signature, creates a Git tag from versionName, publishes a GitHub Release with generated release notes, and attaches both the APK and a SHA-256 checksum.

One-time signing setup

The release action uses a single repository secret named ANDROID_SIGNING_BUNDLE_BASE64. It contains both keystore.properties and keystore/livetube.jks, so there is only one value to configure.

Create the bundle on Linux:

mkdir -p /tmp/livetube-signing/keystore
cp keystore.properties /tmp/livetube-signing/
cp keystore/livetube.jks /tmp/livetube-signing/keystore/
tar -C /tmp/livetube-signing -czf - keystore.properties keystore/livetube.jks | base64 -w 0

Add the resulting one-line value under Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions as ANDROID_SIGNING_BUNDLE_BASE64.

The workflow also verifies the release APK against LiveTube's expected signing-certificate SHA-256 fingerprint before publishing. Never commit the keystore, signing bundle, or passwords to the repository.

Publishing a release

1. Bump versionName and versionCode in app/build.gradle.kts.
2. Merge that change into main.
3. Open Actions → Build and Release APK → Run workflow.
4. Select main, optionally mark it as a pre-release, and run it.

For versionName = "1.1", the workflow creates tag v1.1 and uploads LiveTube-v1.1.apk. It refuses to overwrite an existing tag, so every release needs a new version.

Usage

• Library tab — tap +, paste a channel or playlist URL, it's validated and saved. Tap an item to open its feed; tap a video to play it.
• Player tab — paste any YouTube link (or a direct media URL) and press Play. Toggle Audio only to strip video, and Auto-play next to keep a list playing.
• Download — while a YouTube video is playing, or after pasting its URL, press Download. LiveTube resolves the best single-file stream containing both video and audio and hands it to Android's download manager. The file appears in Downloads and Android shows system download progress.

Download quality

YouTube often serves higher resolutions as separate video-only and audio-only streams. LiveTube intentionally does not merge those tracks yet; downloads use the highest-quality stream that already contains both video and audio. This keeps downloads reliable and avoids bundling a media transcoder.

Live streams cannot be downloaded yet.

Privacy

• No accounts, no telemetry, no ads. Everything is stored on-device (Room database).
• Requires network access to YouTube to fetch feeds and streams.
• Downloads are handled by Android's built-in download manager.

Disclaimer

This app plays and downloads YouTube content through unofficial extraction of stream URLs and isn't endorsed by YouTube/Google. Background playback, audio-only streaming, and downloading YouTube content may not be permitted by YouTube's Terms of Service and may also be restricted by copyright — only download content you have the right to save. The extraction technique can break if YouTube changes its internals.

License

See the LICENSE file, if present. This project's public code is provided as-is for personal use.