Straw

A privacy-focused Android YouTube client. Compose UI, Media3 player, with SponsorBlock auto-skip and Return YouTube Dislike baked in. No login, no Google Play Services, no tracking — Straw talks to public web endpoints only.

Straw is a fork of NewPipe. The extractor is strawcore, a Rust port of NewPipe's extraction logic exposed to Kotlin via UniFFI — there's no InnerTube/JS-deobfuscation code path on the JVM anymore.

Features

• Search, video detail, channel pages, playlists
• Inline player + fullscreen + swipe-down minibar + background audio + PiP
• Media3 ExoPlayer (DASH / HLS / progressive / merged DASH chunks)
• SponsorBlock auto-skip, with per-category toggles
• Return YouTube Dislike on the video detail page
• RSS-based subscription feed (fast — about a second for 50 subscriptions)
• Hide-shorts / hide-paid / hide-age-restricted feed filters
• Resume positions, watch history, search history
• Local playlists; downloads (video + audio)
• Imports NewPipe-format settings (subscriptions + playlists + history)

Out of scope (on purpose)

• Trending / algorithmic feeds — subscriptions only
• iOS / desktop targets — Android only for now
• Anything that needs Google Play Services or an account

Install

Pre-built APKs are published to an F-Droid repository:

https://fdroid.sulkta.com/fdroid/repo

Add that repo to the F-Droid client of your choice and install Straw. The app also self-updates from the same repo when a newer versionCode is published.

If you'd rather build it yourself, see Build below.

Build

Straw is a standard Gradle project with a Rust component (strawcore) compiled for Android via cargo-ndk and bound to Kotlin with uniffi-bindgen. The Gradle build drives both automatically.

Prerequisites

• JDK 21
• Android SDK with platform android-36, build-tools 36.0.0, and NDK r27 (ANDROID_NDK_HOME must point at it)
• A Rust stable toolchain with the four Android targets, plus cargo-ndk and uniffi-bindgen:

rustup target add aarch64-linux-android armv7-linux-androideabi \
                  x86_64-linux-android i686-linux-android
cargo install cargo-ndk uniffi-bindgen

Assemble a debug APK

./gradlew :strawApp:assembleDebug

The APK lands in strawApp/build/outputs/apk/debug/.

Reproducible build image

ci/Dockerfile defines a self-contained image with the exact JDK + Android SDK

• NDK + Rust toolchain the build expects, if you'd rather not install all of that on your host:

docker build -t straw-build ci/
docker run --rm -v "$PWD":/src -w /src straw-build ./gradlew :strawApp:assembleDebug

Project layout

strawApp/   The app — Compose UI, Media3 wiring, SponsorBlock + RYD clients
rust/       strawcore — the UniFFI wrapper crate around the Rust extractor
buildSrc/   Shared Gradle build logic and version constants
iosApp/     Empty iOS shell inherited from upstream (not built)

The actual extraction engine (strawcore-core) lives in a sibling repository, strawcore, and is pulled in as a path/Git dependency by rust/strawcore.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. A few notes:

• Keep changes scoped and described; the build runs lint/format checks.
• The app is Kotlin + Jetpack Compose; the extractor is Rust. Touch the layer the change belongs in.
• By contributing you agree your work is licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later (see License).

License

GPL-3.0-or-later, inherited from upstream NewPipe. See LICENSE.

Upstream

Straw tracks NewPipe; upstream improvements are pulled in periodically. The app/ and shared/ modules from NewPipe were removed once Straw became its own app on the strawcore pipeline.

Disclaimer

Not affiliated with YouTube, Google, NewPipe e.V., the SponsorBlock project, or Return YouTube Dislike. All trademarks belong to their respective owners. Straw uses public web endpoints and does not authenticate to any account.