YouTubeFeed

A clean, ad-free Android client that turns any YouTube channel's public RSS feed into a tappable, in-app video player. No Google account, no recommendations, no Shorts spam.

Built for people who follow a small set of channels and just want a chronological list of their latest uploads.

Features

• Add channels by @handle, channel URL, channel ID, or RSS feed URL
• Chronological feed — newest videos first, no algorithm
• In-app playback via the YouTube IFrame Player API in a WebView — autoplay on tap, with proper landscape fullscreen on enlarge
• Channel detail view — drill into any channel for its uploads only
• Mark all watched — globally on Home or per-channel
• Hide Shorts — toggle in Settings to filter out Shorts everywhere (detected via HEAD probe at fetch time, not by #shorts in titles)
• Background sync — periodic refresh via WorkManager, optional new-video notifications
• Save for later with a bookmark on every video
• Search across titles and channel names
• Light / Dark / System theme

Screenshots

Home feed	Channels	Channel detail	Player
Mark all watched	Settings	Hide Shorts on	Feed without Shorts

Tech stack

• UI: Jetpack Compose with Material 3
• Architecture: MVVM, repository pattern, no DI framework
• Database: Room with Flow
• Networking: OkHttp + a small Atom/RSS pull-parser
• Background: WorkManager for periodic sync
• Image loading: Coil
• Persistence: DataStore (Preferences) for settings
• Player: YouTube IFrame Player API embedded in a WebView served via WebViewAssetLoader over https://appassets.androidplatform.net/ (so YouTube's anti-fraud accepts the origin)

How Shorts detection works

YouTube's Atom feed doesn't expose duration or a "is short" flag, and #shorts in the title is unreliable. So at fetch time, each new videoId is probed:

HEAD https://www.youtube.com/shorts/<videoId>
  → 200 → it's a Short
  → 303 (redirect to /watch) → regular video

The probe runs concurrently for all entries on a feed, and the result is persisted on the row (VideoEntity.isShort). Filtering is then a single SQL parameter.

A subtle gotcha: an Android user-agent gets redirected to m.youtube.com for everything, which kills the signal. The probe sends a desktop UA.

Install

Grab YouTubeFeed-vX.Y.Z.apk from Releases and adb install it, or sideload via your file manager. Min SDK 26.

Build

JAVA_HOME="/Applications/Android Studio.app/Contents/jbr/Contents/Home" \
  ./gradlew assembleRelease

License

MIT