Flow v2.2.1

Release date: 2026-08-28

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New features

• Discord RPC support by @PastaHimself
• TV UI support by @PastaHimself
• Drag left or right on the video to seek, with a toggle in Player Appearance settings
• Hide Shorts across the whole app with a single switch, without deleting your saved reels
• Play your subscriptions' Shorts as one queue in date order instead of a handful from a shelf #823
• Keep going with older Shorts from your subscribed channels once the recent ones run out
• Show a progress line and a watched badge on Shorts you have already seen, in feeds and channel tabs #787
• Picture-in-picture for Shorts, off by default #571
• Choose whether a finished Shorts queue continues with recommendations or stops at the end
• Choose a fallback video codec for videos that do not offer your preferred one, instead of always dropping to H.264 #812

Improvements

• Slimmer player seekbar segment gaps #786
• Improve restricted content filtering #783
• Improve EQ and add it for video player #781
• Improve playback speed
• Use standard media icons so Android Auto, Wear and system controls render them correctly
• Show the player controls the moment you tap instead of waiting to see if a second tap follows
• Add haptic feedback to seeking, the speed boost and the gesture controls
• Follow your finger when swiping down to leave fullscreen, springing back if you let go early
• Zoom the video as you drag up to enter fullscreen
• Let pinch-to-zoom stretch past its limits and settle back when released
• Scale the long-press speed boost from the current speed so it can never slow playback down #867
• Restyle the long-press speed indicator as a pill showing the speed it will actually apply
• Ripple the tapped side of the screen when double-tap seeking
• Offer every dubbed audio track and the full quality ladder on videos that provide them
• Open the same Shorts queue from every surface, starting on the reel you tapped and letting you swipe back through the ones before it
• Swipe through a channel's Shorts in the sort order its tab is showing #547
• Shrink the reel when the comments or settings sheet opens instead of hiding it behind them
• Close the Shorts comments by tapping above them instead of pausing the video #891
• Apply your preferred video codec to live streams #727
• Show the frame rate in the quality selector, so a 60 fps ladder reads as 1080p60 rather than plain 1080p #847
• Show which address this device is advertising on the sync QR screen, so a failed connection is easier to place
• Rebuild the device sync screens on Material 3, with clearer send and receive options, a line explaining everything you can sync, and an easier-to-read pairing code
• Open comments beside the video on tablets in landscape instead of covering it with a sheet #918

Performance

• Faster cold start and smoother scrolling
• Lower idle CPU and battery drain
• Ship a baseline profile and enable strong skipping
• Rebuild ambient mode on a lighter render path
• Move player setup off the startup path
• Share card settings and watch progress across feeds
• Consolidate playback position onto one tick
• Add stable list keys across feeds and search
• Load thumbnails at display size
• Draw waveform and mini-player progress instead of laying them out
• Start videos sooner by keeping remote signature decoding off the path to first frame
• Reuse one attestation session across videos instead of re-running it on every open
• Skip stream resolution for downloaded videos while offline
• Stop paying for work Shorts never uses
• Read audio preferences once per video instead of once per client attempt
• Load the Shorts and music feeds before the work that only appends to them
• Animate the seek bar without re-measuring it on every frame
• Read the player overlay settings in a single pass instead of twelve
• Stop pinch-to-zoom redrawing the whole player overlay on every frame
• Keep the playhead from recomposing the controls several times a second
• Draw the seek bar through one system instead of three overlapping ones

Build and ci

• Add automated Kotlin formatting checks with ktlint and Spotless
• Reduce APK size with ABI-specific releases, resource shrinking, and dependency cleanup
• Improve ABI-aware app updates and GitHub/FOSS release packaging
• Speed up builds with KSP, Gradle caching, improved parallelism, and CI daemon reuse
• Remove obsolete playback and download code
• Fix ktlint rules not being applied by Spotless

Fixes and stability

• Fix playback media-session notifications missing metadata, artwork, controls, and seek state
• Fix background subscription and update notifications not being delivered until the app is opened
• Fix missing channel avatars in comments and replies with cached channel-avatar fallback
• Fix a crash when playback notification artwork finished loading in the background
• Fix the playback notification disappearing when the queue auto-advanced in the background
• Fix videos cutting out around the one-minute mark on auto-dubbed titles
• Fix playback stopping about a minute in and then retrying until it gave up #921 #922
• Fix the wrong audio track being requested on auto-dubbed videos
• Fix the mini player expanding back to the full player while metadata was still loading
• Fix playback on videos that only offer a server-side adaptive stream
• Fix downloaded videos failing to play when offline
• Add a mobile web fallback and a newer VR client for stream extraction
• Fix crash issues
• Fix a crash while typing in search when a suggestion contained certain non-Latin characters #934
• Stop music background tasks from running after the player is closed
• Fix custom SponsorBlock category colours having no effect on the seek bar
• Fix the cast and sleep timer buttons appearing a moment after the rest of the controls
• Fix the brightness readout vanishing while you were still adjusting it
• Fix swiping down to leave fullscreen committing even after you dragged back up
• Remove the auto-translated subtitle languages, which YouTube almost always refused to serve, so picking one showed nothing
• Fix a subtitle track other than the one you picked being used when two of them share a language
• Fix Shorts stalling and playing only in H.264 #917
• Fix Shorts showing in the subscription feed while Shorts were turned off #903
• Fix Shorts appearing among the videos in your home feed
• Fix the comments sheet sticking to the bottom of the screen in vertical fullscreen
• Fix device sync failing whenever one of the selected collections was empty on this device
• Fix your recommendation brain barely transferring during device sync, and never arriving from the desktop app at all
• Fix unblocking a topic or channel never reaching your other device, which kept re-blocking it on the next sync
• Fix sync sending your desktop the tunnel address instead of your Wi-Fi one when a VPN was connected
• Keep every device's learned interests when syncing with a device that has synced with a third one
• Fix Back abandoning the whole sync screen instead of returning to the previous step
• Fix the empty band above the title on the sync screen
• Fix Settings and Notifications being unreachable after turning off the home tab
• Fix tablets dropping to the phone layout after leaving and returning to the app #909
• Fix tablets being locked into portrait after leaving fullscreen, with no way back to landscape #918
• Fix casting to Kodi and other players built on ffmpeg ending the moment it started #916

Dependency

• Bump NewPipeExtractor to v0.26.5
• Update Gradle to 9.6.1 and Android Gradle Plugin to 9.3.1
• Update Kotlin to 2.4.10 with the Compose compiler plugin and KSP 2.3.11
• Update Hilt to 2.60.1 and Room to 2.8.4
• Update Coroutines and Serialization to 1.11.0
• Update baseline profile and benchmark tooling to 1.5.0-beta01
• Update Compose BOM to 2026.06.01 with Material 3 1.4
• Raise compileSdk to 37
• Update Navigation, Lifecycle, Activity, Core, WorkManager, Paging and CameraX
• Update Gson to 2.14.0, Conscrypt to 2.6.1 and core library desugaring to 2.1.5
• Remove unused RxJava and multidex dependencies
• Raise targetSdk to 36 for Android 16 platform behaviour
• Update OkHttp to 5.4.0 and Media3/ExoPlayer to 1.11.0
• Update Coil image loading to 3.5.0
• Update Ktor networking to 3.5.2