Can you elaborate ont he crashes more? when i still had an android phone newpipe was the only app i actively enjoyed using because it was just reliable and simple. the only issues i ever had were the same everyone had when youtube broke the functionality and usually there was a dev build ready in a few hours with a patch and then a proper update pretty shortly after on the main app. but i never used it to sign in to youtube so might be a difference. i specifically chose newpipe because i didn’t need to deal with google’s nonsense when using it

+1

after using piped and newpipe for 1.5+ years, it is not good enough to fully replace youtube app for me. although i believe it has been mostly on the server side and not as much on the client (besides random crashes that were happening when opening a "new" type of video in recent past). currently, most new videos of my subscriptions (manually added) do not show up on time. they often pop up in retrospect, maybe after another person has watched that video on the piped instance.

on ios yattee allows use of both invidious and piped instances and the difference in reliability is night and day between the two. i truly hope the project makes further strides in and achieve a stable experience.

every single newpipe problem is google actively breaking them.

every time it crashed failing to parse some video is even more reason to use it!

I used Newpipe first after degoogling, then switch to Libretube for the supposed privacy benefits. App looked a bit better too and crashed often, but way too often there were problems with connecting the Piped instances it was using for streaming and it was laggy and slowly. Newpipe, conversely, when it works, is fast. Sometimes it crashes repeatedly but the problems are usually resolved quickly. Streaming is good quality and fast.

Yt-dlp is still the gold standard, but in my experience newpipe's reliability has improved in the past year or two.

Did you send crash reports, report the problem with the missing subscriptions, maybe even have a go at finding the cause if you happen to be versed in the technology? I've never seen it crash [1] on any of my devices so I can add that piece of anecdata to yours. I'm not a heavy Newpipe user since I run my own Invidious instance which offers close to the same functionality (minus playing in the background since that needs to be implemented on the device while Invidious is a web service) but for those times I do use Newpipe it works well. On those odd instances it doesn't load the video the solution tends to be an upgrade away.

[1] as in 'the app crashes', not 'the video does not play', the former is a crash while the latter is an incompatibility with Youtube and tends to be solved by upgrading Newpipe.

I really hope "Fix app not responding, background app crashes and issues with starting the player" actually addresses the issue. Getting an ANR popup and having to either dismiss it every 15 seconds or kill the app, search again for your video, and hope it doesn't happen again is a horrible experience.

The only other experience-breaking issue I ran into is lack of support for multiple language tracks, which also seems fixed :)

I've switched to it maybe two months ago and use it in foreground and background mode, tried pip mode once or twice. But I'm using it almost every day. I had maybe four or five crashes so far, nothing that comes even close to the annoyance of YouTube's ad rate nowadays.

Start the app and play something through one bluetooth device. Pause, then connect to another bluetooth device. App won't play videos and bugs out.