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:
- Open Flow → Settings → Data → Export Brain/Backup
- Export your subscriptions if you have any
- Uninstall the old version
- Install v1.8.0
- 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