The natural resistance of YouTube to enabling offline features leads us to explore all kinds of alternatives to play its content locally. Previously, we have learned to download music from YouTube using various online services, and to download videos through Chrome extensions. However, something remains to be addressed... and that is downloading YouTube videos on Android. That's where SkyTube comes in, which, besides offering an obstacle-free download mode, also works as a partial replacement for the official app.
The interests of an online service and those of its users are not always aligned, and one of the most compelling examples is YouTube. Adjustments to its internal policy, algorithms with a life of their own, lack of advanced options... in short, the platform could be much better than it is.
One of the great absentees is general offline support. Mountain View limits that function to its premium package and the YouTube Go app, but the Web offers very interesting alternatives. Previously we explained how to download YouTube videos with dedicated tools for Windows, and now it's the turn of Android, using the open source application SkyTube.
How to download YouTube videos on Android with SkyTube
At first glance, SkyTube appears as a replacement for the official YouTube app, with an important difference: it does not support login, and you will have to search for your preferred channels manually. The application presents a series of featured videos, and has a trends section based on the language it has detected (the region and language can be modified in the configuration section).
An interesting aspect of SkyTube is that it allows us to block certain videos and channels by applying whitelisting / blacklisting systems, or filter videos if they have too many dislikes or few views. The option to download YouTube videos on Android is hidden behind the three-dot menu that accompanies each video. Click on the menu, and then on Download to start.
If you want to change the minimum and maximum quality of the videos to download, you can do so within the Networks and Downloads section in the app's Preferences. The rest of the functions in SkyTube are controlled using gestures. For example, a swipe from right to left opens the comments on the video, and from bottom to top loads its description.
There are three ways to get SkyTube to download YouTube videos on Android: using its official page (link below), visiting the GitHub profile, or with the help of the alternative store F-Droid. The Extra variant includes elements that are not open source, but in return we receive secondary functions such as Chromecast support. Give it a try!
Official site: Click here
