New invidio.us type F-droid app for playing and downloading youtube videos - NewPipe

This is a very interesting app, I had been looking for an easy way to get invidio.us functions and youtube-dl functions in a functional app on a phone. It's GPL-licensed, seems to have a bit of a community behind it.

NewPipe claims to be focused on privacy, so claims not to give youtube any info on you. I'm not sure how successful it is at shielding its users identities yet - I'm still trying it out for the first time today.

Also has beta functionality to play music and videos off of soundcloud, framatube/peertube, and mediaccc. soundcloud worked very well in my short test.

Some nice features are ability to download in different formats like youtube-dl - video or audio, with different codecs and different download sizes. Has the ability to download to an SD card. Also has the ability to play your downloads. Has the ability to play any media with the screen turned off, or while you are in a different app on your mobile device.

Claims not to implement any functions that would allow a user to be tracked (as I said, I need to check this claim further), and not to use the youtube api. On youtube, NewPipe not allow mp3 downloads - uses m4a or opus on audio, and mp4 on video. However, when I tested download from soundcloud, it looked like mp3 was my only option. I haven't explored this very much yet.

Overall, a very slick app with great performance for me in my testing so far today. If you are looking for a libre youtube alternative on mobile, looks like this is a contender.
https://newpipe.schabi.org/