Flow v2.1.0

LIBRARIES

• Bump NewpipeExtractor to latest version (v0.26.1)

FEATURES

• Add new save state for subscriptions feed display settings #221
• Add new remember playback speed toggle #229
• Russian localization #230 provided by @vazinoc
• subscriptions worker check customizations
• New playback speed options up to 4x #235
• New gesture: Swipe down to exit full screen mode
• New playback speed preset customizations #236
• New pinch and double tap gestures to resize mini player
• Add new Diagnostic screen to capture error and crash logs globaly in the app
• Add new playback speed slider toggle option
• Add shorts player disable toggle #258
• Add watched videos filtering toggle in feed #245
• Add global crash reporter and crash screen
• Add player cache limit options #243
• Add new region selector in the explore screen #249
• Add new merge playlists feature #263
• Add new video title lines customizer #283
• Add new action button to video card
• Add new SponsorBlock segments download with videos #278
• Add new shorts playback behavior toggle
• Add new Themes : Monochrome and Custom themes #293
• Add new automated Backup and master backup features #290
• Add new Deep Flow (Incognito mode) #282
• Add new subscription groups #288
• Add new DeArrow indicator toggle #291
• Add new in-channel video search #313
• Add channel avatar expanded preview #318
• Add new copy video and channel urls in video quick actions #325
• Add new mark as watched quick access button #340
• Add new Subscriptions export for newpipe #317

IMPROVEMENTS

• New miniplayer secondary action buttons layout #225
• Splash screen color #233
• Add aggressive codec fetching for AV1/AV01 #226
• Improve clickable links in video comments and description #244
• Add pinned comment support #255
• Improve volume and brightness gestures handling
• Improve video player support for bluetooth media control buttton #254
• Improve pip mode handling #241
• Add cipher and PoToken generation for better music streaming handling Based and ported from MetroList's implementation (https://github.com/MetrolistGroup/Metrolist)
• Add Horizontal pager for horizontal swiping between channel tabs #248
• Smoother video to audio swithing (uses a shared cache) #243
• Add Download progress card in download screen #266
• Improve notifications container #257
• Improve muxer for faster merging
• Expand content backups #280
• Improved video gesture handling #284
• Improve Shorts filtring #285
• Engine calibration, improved watch signal for new topics and feed balancing #281
• Improve Engine performace
• Add togglable Flow logo icon to top bar
• Improve mini player handling and smoother animation
• Improve video watch progress tracking #300
• Add new permission section in download settings #279
• Improve watched videos hiding logic #305
• Improve media playback notification handling #304 #310
• Improve Personality screen performance
• Improved Pause/Resume download and add better partial block handling #306
• Add close button to video playback notification #310
• Add new Monero (XMR) donation option and improve donation screen UI
• Improve SponsorBlock segment auto fill and Unify SponsorBlock and DeArrow #308
• Show Video download status
• Improve Home feed and Subscription screen subs recency #311
• Improve comments UI features #318
• Improve video player UI and handling #321 #324
• Improve sticky tabs in channels #322
• Remove seek preview feature #334
• Improve mini player scaling #330
• Improve Splash screen colors

FIXES AND STABILITY

• Fix video player playback speed issue #232
• Fix video title formats #222
• Add nullable music search result checks #223
• Fix music search results #223
• Fix music playback #242
• Fix forced layout on tablets #228
• Fix comments sorting to newest #240
• Fix RTL mini player handling #187
• Fix Video progress not displayed in channel screen #237
• Fix Channel avatar display issue in home feed #251
• Fix Playing a song automatically switches to last played video #243
• Fix Black screen when audio only download #274
• Fix Subtitle crash #271
• Fix Icon mismatch with splash screen #252
• Fix Missing channel avatars in categories and shorts #276
• Fix Playback issues after pip #264
• Fix Double-Tap seek handling #286
• Fix Shorts UI and bugs #287
• Fix Search bar related issues #272
• Fix Go-To-Channel in categories screen #294
• Fix Song Artwork resolution in notification shader #296
• Fix DLNA casting resolution #299
• Fix Permissions #279
• Fix Music player UI colors #303
• Fix Depricated DeArrow endpoint #320
• Fix Video playback issues #324
• Fix Pul-to-refresh in music screen #335 by @Amruth-hiremath
• Fix Status bar colors #333
• Fix Blurry app icon #336
• Fix AV1 4K download #342
• Fix Video crash #345

New Contributors

• @ItsMe-95fx made their first contribution in #344

Full Changelog: v2.0.5...v2.1.0

Flow v2.0.5

IMPORTANT: BUILD FLAVORS

The app now offers 2 build flavors:

• Default Github flavor with apk update checks when new release is available.
• FOSS flavor without update checks for IzzyOnDroid and F-Droid submission.

NEW FEATURES

• New Audio focus toggle to continue playing videos while on a call #175 #177
• Add new copy video link at time stamps button #178
• Add new direct video link copy button #178
• Pinch-to-zoom gesture #184
• Swipe up to enter fullscreen in the video player #183
• Add new disable home feed toggle #195
• Add new related video card style toggle #191
• Add new voice search for videos #203
• Add new toggle to enable search icon from bottom nav #201
• Add new custom app icon picker #169
• Add new country search for trending country settings picker #208
• Add new save public playlist to library for music and videos
• Add new manual sponsor skip button #215
• Add voice stabilizer toggle to player settings menu #217
• Add new category screen toggle #218

IMPROVEMENTS

• FlowNeuroEngine modularization
• Smarter Discovery Query Generation
• Improved content tokenization - Domain based
• Tuned engine learning rates
• Engine and content stability
• Add new learning from tags contexts
• Improved filtering on marked content #173
• Hide related video when marked in the video player screen #172
• Add shorts deduplication in the subs screen shorts shelf #138 #162
• Optimized shorts loading speeds
• Video quick actions menu
• Remove warmup connections and increase subs check to 6 hrs instead of 30 min #185
• Menu options redesign
• Add video card press and hold to open quick actions
• Increase video title to 2 lines #197
• Move SponsorBlock contribution settings to player settings screen #193
• Add load more feature for comments #204
• Add channel screen position caching #196
• Search screen filters and layout improvements #206
• Add 144p and 240p to default download settings #209
• Update custom download path selection to use SAF folder picker #210
• Add video tags to description
• Add upcoming badge for videos that are about to premier #216
• Improve music player scroll and drag handling
• Add notifications customization to video player and subscription screens #219
• Notifications screen UI improvements
• Download settings screen UI improvements
• Improve video player error message display

FIXES AND STABILITY

• Keyboard Focus and pop up
• Fix shorts quality preferences #170
• Fix missing audio tracks #171
• Fix orientation when re-entering video player #179
• Fix continue watching mini-player #167
• Fix seek to preview box shape #179
• Fix video timestamps #192
• Fix video delete issues #95
• Fix share button issues #176
• Fix video and gestures for RTL #187 #188
• Fix comment sheet collapsing when scrolling #189
• Fix Download settings to properly use chosen download path preferences #211
• Fix shorts metadata and download sizes
• Fix crash on radio button click in music search screen

📋 System Requirements

• Android 5.0 (API 21) or higher
• Minimum 2GB RAM recommended

Full Changelog: v2.0.0...v2.0.5

Flow v2.0.0

IMPORTANT: Package Name Migration

The application package name has been updated from com.flow.youtube to io.github.aedev.flow. This is a significant structural change. Please Backup your data before uninstalling the old version and download the new one

NEW FEATURES

• Content sorting in channel screen
• Search filters
• Clear video from feed when marked by "Not Interested", "Don't show channel", or "Mark as Watched"
• Continue watching mini-player with disable option in the Player Settings
• Add a mark as "not interested" and "want more like this" to shorts
• Audio Boost to 200% for supported codecs
• Auto video loop toggle
• Auto Theme based on system active Theme
• Subscription Notification Filtering
• Add a new StreamProxyServer for better Url handling during casting - This will avoid IP-locks and 403 errors

IMPROVEMENTS

• Improved video player action buttons design and sizes.
• Remove swipe to seek guesture and redesigned double tap seek
• Improved edge-to-edge display
• Redesigned Search bars
• Improved video thumbnail quality
• Channel screen Redesign
• Removed rewind video on privious click feature
• Removed redudant 3-dot menu buttons in the music quick actions menu
• More responsive video player dragging
• Sequantial content loading for channels
• Shorts screen UI and anti-repetition
• Improve player button clicks
• Search Keyboard & Focus Improvements
• Improve RSS service for Subscriptions
• Immersive Music Player with dynamic color extraction from album art
• Adaptive Grid layout for Search Screen

RECOMMENDATION ENGINE

• Fixed cross-topic contamination
• Removed dangerous lemma mappings
• Smoother scoring
• Consolidated 19 inline scoring factors into grouped helper functions for cleaner ranking logic
• Description keywords now skip sponsor copy, social media links, hashtags, and URLs before extraction
• Expanded blocked topic filtering
• New bootstrapFromWatchHistory()
• Shorts from subscribed channels get 3x subscription boost
• All feed paths (trending, Shorts shelf, home feed) now pass through the ranking engine
• Instant feed invalidation
• New Shorts discovery engine
• Channel Topic extraction
• Anti-Recommendation
• Watch Velocity
• Engagement Momentum
• Subscription Freshness

FIXES AND STABILITY

• Fix Unresponsive player when clicking
• Fix Default Auto Quality stuck at highest quality and improved thresholds
• Fix previous video rewind issue in queue
• Fix music playback issues from Music History & Likes
• Fix video playback issue on Fullscreen expansion
• Fix Subs tab Shorts sort order — old Shorts no longer appear at top of subscription feed
• Fix Non-Shorts videos under 2 minutes opening in shorts player
• Fix Sheets opening in full screen
• Fix Music Player "Up Next" Scrolling & End Indicator
• Fix Video Upload Time incorrectly showing offset due to timezone parsing
• Fix Notifications are faulty and videos lag at the beginning #156
• Fix [BUG] screencasting not working #161
• Fix Keyboard pop up & Focus in Search Screen

📋 System Requirements

• Android 5.0 (API 21) or higher
• Minimum 2GB RAM recommended

Full Changelog: v1.9.0...v2.0.0

Flow v1.9.0

NEW FEATURES

• Customizable Player Overlay — added settings to toggle visibility of Cast, CC, PiP, Autoplay, and Sleep Timer icons on the player
• Background Playback — added a dedicated "Background" button below the video to easily switch to audio-only background mode
• Auto-Fullscreen — player now automatically enters and exits fullscreen mode upon device rotation
• Clean Loading State — implemented a cleaner initial player load that hides controls until metadata is ready
• Add a Related Videos section Toggle in Content Display Settings
• Add a Remove button to songs in playlists
• Add a Custom Interest input in Content Preferences — type any topic to follow it directly
• 2D Free-Floating Mini Player — the video mini-player now floats freely across the screen. Drag it anywhere, and it seamlessly snaps to any of the 4 corners, or swipe to dismiss it entirely.
• Customizable Mini Player Size — you can now adjust the dimensions of the free-floating mini video player (Small, Normal, Large)
• Custom Mini Player Controls — added the ability to show/hide "Skip Forward/Backward" and "Next/Previous" buttons directly on the floating player
• Navigation Customization — added a toggle in Content Settings to show or hide the "Music" tab from the bottom navigation bar (similar to the Shorts tab)
• Add a Settings Search Feature
• Draggable Music Player — the music player is now a persistent bottom-sheet overlay. Drag it up to expand to full screen, drag down to collapse back to the mini player. Smooth spring animations and fling gestures throughout.
• Add new share intent for videos
• Add a open video from URL search
• Add a new Countdown timer — Clicking on the video duration pill will change it to a countdown

IMPROVEMENTS

• Improve thumbnail quality — higher resolution thumbnails are now automatically fetched for videos, channels, and playlists
• Home Screen Layout — switch between grid and list views for your home feed from Layout Settings
• Add a Back Arrow in Player settings for easy navigation
• Lyrics Parser
• Update Algorithm filters to block full category instead of individual keywords
• Scrollable Blocked content section in Personality Screen
• Channel name fetching using ID in Personality Screen
• Improved Algorithm fallback — Exclude Trending to avoid the Brainrot content
• Added Bootstrap from subscriptions — Tokenize channels to improve recommendations on cold start
• Refine UI interactions and Animation — Add on press scale modifier, thumbnail gradients and more...
• Set Dark Theme as default
• Music player full-screen view now respects the status bar with proper top padding for an immersive edge-to-edge look
• Restored system-wide edge-to-edge display — the app now correctly maintains edge-to-edge after exiting video fullscreen mode
• Improved Music player screen UI - Added more spacing, padding and bigger action button
• Clear broken search filters
• Improved Video Player UI — reduced spacing and made it more compact for a cleaner look

FIXES AND STABILITY

• Fix search screen crash — resolved issue when infinite scrolling through identical playlists
• Fix swipe gesture sensitivity — increased thresholds on video player to prevent accidental skipping
• Fix music playlist track count — UI now updates instantly when adding songs to local playlists
• Fix fullscreen brightness persistence — brightness now correctly resets to system default after exiting fullscreen playback
• Fix video replay timecode — videos now automatically seek back to 0 when replaying from the end
• Fix watch history resume — resolved issue where videos occasionally resumed from 0 due to a race condition during player cleanup
• Fix video title localization — video titles now appear in their original language based on system locale instead of defaulting to English (#124)
• Fix Helium Effect on songs
• Fix PiP close button — tapping X on the PiP window now stops playback instead of leaving audio running in the background
• Fix Playlist Download — added missing codec
• Fix Download Deletion process
• Fix Fast-Forward and Seek issue for downloaded videos — Add better seek and forward signals for downloaded videos
• Fix saved song showing 0:00 duration on restore — restored tracks now display their correct duration immediately on app launch
• Fix play button doing nothing on restored music track — tapping play on a restored (unloaded) track now correctly fetches the stream and starts playback
• Fix Go to channel issue in search screen

📋 System Requirements

• Android 5.0 (API 21) or higher
• Minimum 2GB RAM recommended

Full Changelog: v1.8.5...v1.9.0

Flow v1.8.5

This is a patch release. If you are already on v1.8.0 or later, this update installs normally with no data loss.

If you are updating from v1.7.x or earlier, see the v1.8.0 release notes for migration instructions.

---

What's New

New Features

• Notification Preferences: New screen in Settings to individually toggle new-video alerts, download notifications, screen time reminders, app updates, and general notifications. All types enabled by default. Includes a shortcut to jump directly to Android's per-channel system notification settings.
• Sleep Timer: Available in both the music and video players. Set a countdown to automatically pause playback using preset durations or a custom time entry. Works during background playback and picture-in-picture. Optional "close app" mode stops all playback services and finishes the activity when the timer fires, preserving battery life overnight.
• "Don't Show This Channel" Quick Action: Tap the menu on any video card and select "Don't show this channel" under the Algorithm section to permanently filter that channel from your recommendations. The block is persisted to your profile and fully reversible from Settings → Content Preferences → Blocked.

Recommendation Engine (V9.1 — "Anti-Repetition")

This release includes a major update to Flow's on-device recommendation engine focused on eliminating repetitive feeds and improving performance on low-end hardware.

Performance

• Pre-compiled Regex: Eliminates thousands of regex object allocations per ranking cycle, reducing CPU overhead significantly on budget devices.
• Non-blocking Export: Brain state is now copied under lock, then serialized and written to disk after the lock is released. Exporting your profile no longer freezes recommendations.
• IDF Dead Weight Pruning: Words that decay to zero frequency are now removed from memory instead of persisting as zombie entries consuming RAM indefinitely.

New Ranking Signals

• Impression Fatigue: Videos shown in previous feed loads but not clicked now receive exponentially decaying score penalties — seen once: ×0.85, seen 3+ times: ×0.30, seen 5+ times: ×0.05. Impression counts clear when you click a video or reset the session. Not persisted across app restarts so relaunching the app always feels fresh.
• Already-Watched Penalty: Fully watched videos are nearly invisible in future feeds (×0.02), half-watched videos receive a heavy penalty (×0.30), and briefly sampled videos get a mild penalty (×0.70). Music exception: tracks under 8 minutes are exempt so you can replay songs freely. Watch progress is persisted across app restarts.
• Engagement Rate Floor (Clickbait Filter): Videos older than 24 hours with over 50K views but less than 1% like-to-view ratio receive a ×0.2 penalty, acting as a proxy for YouTube's hidden dislike count. A time guard prevents false positives on newly uploaded videos that haven't accumulated likes yet.

Algorithm Fixes

• Fixed crash (NPE) in description chapter detection when video description is null.
• Onboarding warmup boost is now applied after session fatigue as an additive bonus, preventing your preferred topics from vanishing during early sessions.
• Channel score recovery from "Not Interested" — floor raised from 0.05 to 0.20, reducing the number of positive interactions needed to recover a channel from ~45 to ~14.
• Lemmatization now runs before stop-word filtering so both "compilation" and "compilations" are consistently handled instead of one slipping through.
• Exploration queries now cross-reference your blocked topics to prevent suggesting categories you've explicitly rejected.
• IDF weights are now persisted and computed only from videos you've interacted with, not from all ranking candidates, ensuring consistent weighting across sessions.
• Feature cache invalidation is now deterministic — an IDF snapshot is taken once per ranking call to prevent mid-rank score drift.

Bug Fixes

• Duration badge now hidden entirely when duration is zero and the video isn't live (was showing "0:00").
• Live streams now show a red LIVE badge instead of a duration.
• Fixed shorts routing condition triggering on regular videos with durations between 1–120 seconds instead of only on actual Shorts.
• Fixed downloaded videos having all-underscore filenames for non-Latin titles (Arabic, Chinese, etc.) — the filename sanitizer now uses Unicode-aware character classes so original title characters are preserved.
• Fixed the bottom navigation home button doing nothing when pressed from the search screen — home navigation now uses popBackStack instead of navigate(), avoiding a launchSingleTop+restoreState edge case that silently no-ops when the search screen sits above home on the back stack.
• Fixed search result playlists being unclickable — tapping a playlist in search results now opens the playlist detail screen. Video and channel results were already functional but playlists had an empty click handler wired to nowhere.
• Fixed sleep timer "close app" mode not stopping playback — closing the app now explicitly stops the music and video foreground services before finishing the activity, preventing audio from continuing in the background after the app exits.
• Fixed subscription notifications arriving in large batches — the check worker now collects all new videos across all channels and dispatches a single grouped notification. One new video shows a full notification with thumbnail; two or more shows a single InboxStyle notification listing all channels and titles so the notification shade no longer floods with 10–20 simultaneous alerts.

System Requirements

• Android 8.0 (API 26) or higher
• 2 GB RAM recommended

Full Changelog: v1.8.2...v1.8.5

Flow v1.8.1

This is a patch release. If you are already on v1.8.0, this update installs normally with no data loss.

If you are updating from v1.7.x or earlier, see the v1.8.0 release notes for migration instructions.

---

What's New

New Features

• LibreTube Import: Import subscriptions directly from a LibreTube backup file. Embedded avatars are reused; only missing thumbnails trigger a network fetch.
• Metrolist Import: Import music playlists from a Metrolist backup (.zip). All playlists and tracks are imported with full thumbnail and duration data. Local-file-only entries are skipped.
• Playlist Downloads: Download full video playlists with one tap. Capped at 720p for reliable MP4 output.
• Playlist Page Redesign: Music playlists now show large centered artwork with an ambient blurred background matching the music player. Title, artist, track count, duration, and description displayed below. Top bar transitions from transparent to solid on scroll.
• Add Songs to Playlist: Playlists now have an inline search bar. Typing triggers live debounced search — tap the + icon on any result to add it instantly.
• Mini Player Click-to-Expand: Tapping anywhere on the collapsed mini video player expands it to full screen. Close and play/pause buttons still work as expected.
• Copy Logs Button: The video player error overlay now has a "Copy Logs" button that copies device info, Android version, ExoPlayer state, and recent player events to the clipboard for easy bug reporting.

Imports & Onboarding

• Background Import System: Imports are now managed by an activity-scoped ViewModel and survive screen navigation. Leaving the Import screen no longer cancels the operation.
• Import Progress Notifications: A persistent notification shows live import progress while running. A completion notification is posted when finished.
• Live Progress Banner: An animated progress banner appears inside the Import screen and onboarding Import step during active imports.
• NewPipe Handle URLs: Fixed subscriptions from NewPipe exports using handle-style URLs being silently skipped. The parser now resolves handles correctly.
• YouTube Takeout BOM Fix: Fixed Takeout CSV files with UTF-8 BOM causing the first channel ID to parse incorrectly. Quoted channel names from regional exports are also handled.
• Channel Avatar Resolution: Fixed avatar fetching for handle channels. The URL is now constructed as youtube.com/handle instead of youtube.com/channel/handle.

Performance

• Instant Music Playback: Tracks now begin buffering immediately on tap instead of waiting for stream URL resolution. ExoPlayer starts its audio pipeline right away using a resolving data source. Cached URLs (up to 10 minutes based on server-reported expiry) are served instantly. Duplicate history writes on each tap have been removed.

Video Player Fixes

• YouTube Session Expiry: Fixed the "YouTube data changed" error where videos failed with a generic network error. HTTP 403 and 410 responses are now detected as expired stream URLs and trigger a silent re-fetch, resuming playback without user action.
• Screen Off/On Refocus: Fixed the player showing 0:00 / 0:00 after turning the screen off and back on. The refocus handler now detects and recovers from three stuck states: IDLE, ghost-READY, and false-ENDED.
• Expanded Error Coverage: The error handler now covers every PlaybackException code in Media3 1.4.x, including decoder format errors, DRM failures, audio track errors, and cleartext-not-permitted. All errors feed into the diagnostic buffer for the Copy Logs feature.

Bug Fixes

• Mini Player Snap Regression: Fixed the mini player randomly snapping to collapsed state after v1.8.0. Caused by maxOffset resetting when the bottom nav bar visibility changed. Now held constant throughout the session.
• Mini Player Fling Direction: Fixed upward fling gestures being ignored. The drag handler now explicitly handles negative velocity for expand gestures.
• Live Stream Segments: Fixed 30-second live stream issue and added a live-specific progress bar.
• Playlist Shuffle: Fixed the shuffle button being wired as a no-op. It now shuffles the track list and starts playback from the first shuffled track.
• Playlist Search Keyboard Overlap: Fixed the inline search bar being hidden behind the soft keyboard. The list now applies IME padding and scrolls to the search bar on focus.
• Playlist Search Trigger: Fixed results not appearing until the IME action was pressed. Results now fetch automatically 350ms after each keystroke.

System Requirements

• Android 8.0 (API 26) or higher
• 2GB RAM recommended

Full Changelog: v1.8.0...v1.8.1

Flow v1.8.0

Before you update: This release uses a new app signing key. Android will not let you install it over the previous version — you need to uninstall the old app first, which deletes local data. Export your data before uninstalling.

Steps:

1. Open Flow → Settings → Data → Export Brain/Backup
2. Export your subscriptions if you have any
3. Uninstall the old version
4. Install v1.8.0
5. Open Flow → Settings → Data & Privacy → Import Brain/Backup

Your recommendation profile, history, and preferences will be restored. If you skip the export, you will start fresh.

---

What's New

Core

• New Signing Key: App signing key rotated for security. This is a one-time change — future updates will install normally.

FlowNeuro Engine V8

• Independent Pacing: Pacing is now derived from title keywords (e.g., "compilation" = fast, "podcast" = slow) instead of being tied to video duration.
• Local IDF Weighting: Common words like "gameplay" are automatically down-weighted over time so niche-specific terms drive recommendations.
• Snowball Fetching: The app now fetches related videos from your recent watches and feeds them into the ranking pool alongside search results, creating natural topic transitions.
• Description Intelligence: Video descriptions are parsed for keywords and chapter timestamps to improve topic extraction and complexity scoring.
• Weekend/Weekday Awareness: Time-based recommendations now distinguish weekday and weekend patterns separately (8 time buckets instead of 4).
• Topic Co-occurrence: Topics that frequently appear together in liked videos build affinity scores that boost matching content.
• Engagement Rate Signal: Videos with high like-to-view ratios receive a quality boost during ranking.
• Adaptive Diversity: When only 2-3 topics dominate your profile, the feed tightens per-topic limits and reserves slots for new content.
• Topic Blocking Scrubs Vectors: Blocking a topic now removes its scores from all internal vectors, not just the filter list.
• Vector Rebalancing: After negative feedback, over-concentrated topic scores are compressed to prevent single-topic domination.
• Watch-Time Weighting: Absolute minutes watched now contribute to the learning rate alongside percentage watched.
• Query Jitter: Discovery queries append temporal variation to prevent stale results from YouTube's search API.
• Session Tracking: Internal session fatigue, auto-reset after 30 minutes of inactivity, sustained-interest boost, and binge detection.
• Onboarding Improvements: Seed weights differentiated by selection order, decaying warmup over first 50 interactions.
• Backup Compatibility: V6/V7 brain backups now migrate correctly into the new 8-bucket time system.
• Negative Feedback Fixes: Weak topics can now be suppressed. Channel blocking scrubs stored scores. Discovery queries filter blocked terms. Persona tracking auto-updates. Channel pruning retains disliked channels.

New Features

• Subscription Feed Caching: Subscriptions cached locally with a 2-hour cooldown. Already-watched shorts filtered out automatically.
• Accurate Error Messages: The player now shows the actual reason a video can't play (age-restricted, private, geo-blocked, etc.) with a Retry button for recoverable failures.
• Downloaded Videos Queue: Queue system for downloaded videos, matching the existing playlist queue.
• Priority Player Loading: Video player loads independently from the rest of the page for faster playback start.
• YouTube Takeout Import: Import watch history and subscriptions from YouTube Takeout exports.
• Search Paging: Search results now support infinite scrolling with full paging.
• Playback Notification: Dedicated notification for background playback control.
• Navigation State Preservation: Scroll positions are preserved when switching between screens.
• Download Storage Protection: Storage scanning and data wipe prevention for offline content.
• Download Buffer Increase: Buffer raised from 2MB to 8MB for more reliable downloads.
• Click To Scroll Up: Tapping a navigation button while already on that screen scrolls back to the top.
• Paging Support: Integrated across various screens for smooth infinite scrolling.

UI & Design

• Onboarding Redesign: New 3-step onboarding with import data and search/subscribe steps.
• About Screen Redesign: Flat section-based layout with App, Contact, Legal, and Device sections. Added Reddit link (r/Flow_Official).
• Music Screen Shimmer: Loading skeleton now matches the actual music layout instead of reusing the home screen skeleton.
• Bottom Nav Scroll Animation: Navigation bar hides on scroll down, reappears on scroll up.
• Dynamic Mini Player Positioning: Mini players track nav bar visibility and reposition accordingly.
• Global Mini Player: Music mini player redesigned as a global overlay.
• Music Player Bottom Sheet: Updated with solid background colors.
• Search UI Redesign: Improved search interface with better filtering.
• Video Card Titles: Improved title truncation to prevent awkward clipping.
• Update Dialog Redesign: Refreshed in-app update dialog.
• Download Size Accuracy: Improved file size display for downloads.

Bug Fixes

• VP9 Download Fix: VP9/VP8 downloads now use WebM/Opus output format instead of MP4, which Android's MediaMuxer couldn't handle. Files saved as .webm.
• AV1 Download Fix: Added a pure-Kotlin EBML/Matroska muxer for AV1 downloads. Produces valid .mkv files playable in ExoPlayer, VLC, and MX Player. No FFmpeg needed.
• Playback Refocus Fix: Fixed screen-off/on causing 0s/0s duration and skipping to the next video.
• Download Delete on Back: Fixed downloads being cancelled when pressing back during the undo window.
• Background Playback Stability: Improved reliability on Xiaomi, Samsung, CRDroid, and Huawei devices with aggressive battery management.
• Downloaded Video Playback: Fixed race condition where switching between downloaded videos played the wrong file.
• Surface Lifecycle Crash: Fixed black screen crash after screen-off/on during background playback.
• Instant Download Deletion: Download deletion is now immediate with no undo delay.
• Resume Position Fix: Fixed videos not resuming from saved position when opened from Continue Watching.
• Subscription Fetching Fix: Resolved video fetching issues in the Subscriptions screen.
• Build CI: Added caching and reusable artifacts for faster builds.

System Requirements

• Android 8.0 (API 26) or higher
• 2GB RAM recommended

Full Changelog: v1.7.5...v1.8.0

Flow v1.7.5

What's New

Major Updates

• DeArrow Integration: Replace clickbait titles and thumbnails with community alternatives. Enable in Player Settings for a cleaner browsing experience.
• Live Streams Support: Channels now have a dedicated "Live" tab to showcase live streams, making it easier to discover ongoing broadcasts.
• Enhanced Lyrics: Completely redesigned lyrics fetching with parallel processing, faster word-sync from BetterLyrics/SimpMusic, and improved fallback options.
• Settings Backup/Restore: Export and import your app settings, including preferences and data, for easy migration or backup.

Music & Playback

• HLS for Live Streams: Added HLS manifest support for smoother live stream playback.
• Timestamp Jumping: Click on timestamps in descriptions and comments to jump directly to that point in the video.
• Improved Download Engine: Better parallel downloading with YouTube optimizations, increased buffers, and more reliable media indexing.
• Aspect Ratio Dynamics: Player UI now adjusts dynamically to video aspect ratios, with nested scroll for height control.

UI/UX Refinement

• Quick Actions on Cards: Tap the menu icon on video cards for quick actions like marking as watched or navigating to channels.
• Music Player Polish: Redesigned with better blur, gradients, animations, and spacing for a more immersive experience.
• Controls Reorganization: Premium overlay controls are now better organized with quality pills and improved positioning.
• Shorts Threshold Update: Increased from 80 to 120 seconds for more accurate shorts classification.

Bug Fixes

• Download Reliability: Fixed issues with DASH downloads, media storage permissions, and file visibility through media scanning.
• Muxing Stability: Better error handling and validation for video/audio combining, preventing incompatible codec issues.
• Orientation Fixes: Fullscreen now respects video orientation, fixing rotations for vertical content.

Technical Improvements

• Library Update: Upgraded NewPipeExtractor to v0.26.0 for enhanced extraction.
• Performance Optimizations: Improved animations, reactive UI updates, and resource efficiency across the app.
• Code Quality: Refactored key components for better maintainability, including theme loading and subtitle management.

📋 System Requirements

• Android 5.0 (API 21) or higher
• Minimum 2GB RAM recommended

Full Changelog: v1.7.0...v1.7.5

Flow v1.7.0

What's New

Major Updates

• Continue Watching Shelf: Stay on track with a new "Continue Watching" section on the home screen, featuring a toggle to disable it in settings.
• Enhanced Casting: Migrated from Google SDK to a robust DLNA/UPnP casting architecture, providing better compatibility with a wider range of devices.
• Algo Data Management: Introduced advanced import and export capabilities for the app's recommendation engine data.
• Native Casting Support: Full support for Cast/Chromecast integration, allowing you to easily stream content to your TV.

Music & Playback

• Multi-Provider Lyrics: Added support for multiple lyrics providers (Lrclib, Better Lyrics, SimpMusic, and YouTube) with significantly improved sync timing.
• Advanced Player UI: A new multi-progress bar slider design and a dedicated Player Appearance settings screen for deeper visual customization.
• Queue Management: You can now "Play Next" or "Add to Queue" directly from video cards for a more flexible viewing experience.
• Shorts Player Upgrades: Added in-player audio track selection and video quality controls specifically for the Shorts player.
• Interactive Feeds: Implemented "Pull to Refresh" functionality for both the Subscriptions and Music screens.

UI/UX Refinement

• Screen Overhauls: Refined and improved the UI design for the Downloads, Onboarding, and Time Management screens.
• Gesture Controls: New options to disable brightness and volume gestures in the video player settings.
• Quick Actions: Added "Mark as Watched" and "Recommend More" shortcuts to video quick action menus.
• Interaction Updates: Enabled text selection and copying within video descriptions and expanded supported regions to over 137 countries.
• Modern Styling: Improved music player controls, gradients, and animations for a smoother feel.

Bug Fixes

• Subscription Reliability: Reverted to a combined RSS + NewPipeExtractor system for faster and more reliable subscription fetching.
• Download Stability: Resolved issues with download failures, external storage permissions, and notification progress tracking.
• Playback & Sync: Fixed AV sync problems, audio track selection crashes, and background playback issues on Android 12.
• Content Tracking: Corrected "Save to Watch Later" issues and improved SponsorBlock segment integration.
• UI Stability: Fixed unreadable elements on high-resolution displays and resolved player overlay navigation collapses.

Technical Improvements

• Download Engine 2.0: Completely refactored the download logic to support multi-location storage (internal vs. external).
• Modern API Integration: Introduced InnerTube API for more efficient subscription caching and optimization.
• Code Refactoring: Migrated deprecated UI components to modern Compose APIs and refactored the video subtitle engine for better performance.

📋 System Requirements

• Android 5.0 (API 21) or higher
• Minimum 2GB RAM recommended

Full Changelog: v1.6.0...v1.7.0

Flow v1.6.0

What's New

Major Updates

• Time Management Features: Take control of your viewing habits with new watch time statistics and customizable bedtime/break reminders.
• Shorts Engine 2.0: A complete re-architecture of the Shorts feature featuring a dedicated player pool and ViewModel for smoother scrolling and faster playback.
• Enhanced Lyrics: Experience better synced lyrics support with improved timing and UI integration.

Music & Playback

• Playlist Queue: A new, robust queue system for playlists with dedicated UI management.
• Video Looping: You can now loop your favorite videos directly in the player.
• Performance Boost: Faster loading times for the music player and improved memory management for album metadata.
• Unified Bottom Sheet: Redesigned the music player's bottom sheet for a more cohesive and modern feel.

UI/UX Refinement

• Home Screen Shimmers: New grid-style loading effects and dynamic layout options for the home feed.
• Settings Redesign: Overhauled the Import and Content settings screens for better navigation.
• Modern Interactions: Migrated to ripple indications and updated SwipeToDismiss for a more "native" Android feel.

Bug Fixes

• Resolved the "state conflict" issue where the video and music mini players would occasionally overlap.
• Fixed Video Player auto-full screen bugs and ensured the screen stays awake during playback.
• Corrected SponsorBlock segment highlights and shorts popup behavior.
• Cleaned up French localization and fixed various XML syntax errors.

Technical Improvements

• String Extraction: Optimized the app for future translations by refactoring hardcoded strings across 10+ screens.
• Modern Stack: Updated Kotlin, Hilt, and KSP; migrated the build system to Version Catalogs.
• Ripple Indication: Refactored core navigation components to use the latest Compose ripple APIs.

New Contributors

• @MXC48 made their first contribution in #39

📋 System Requirements

• Android 5.0 (API 21) or higher
• Minimum 2GB RAM recommended

Full Changelog: v1.5.0...v1.6.0

Thank you for using Flow! Your feedback helps us build a better user experience.