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Remove broken download functionality#8543

Merged
FreeTubeBot merged 1 commit into
FreeTubeApp:developmentfrom
absidue:remove-downloading
Jan 21, 2026
Merged

Remove broken download functionality#8543
FreeTubeBot merged 1 commit into
FreeTubeApp:developmentfrom
absidue:remove-downloading

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@absidue

@absidue absidue commented Jan 18, 2026

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Pull Request Type

  • Cleanup

Related issue

Description

The downloading functionality in FreeTube has been unmaintained for a long time, was already partially broken and a bad user experience before switching to SABR and is now fully broken with SABR. As we don't want to maintain that part of FreeTube and adding support for SABR would require a major rewrite, this pull request removes it instead.

There are already more than enough YouTube downloaders that users can use, such as yt-dlp, that do way more than FreeTube's very primitive downloader ever did. Copying video, channel and playlist links is possible all over FreeTube and exporting a list of video links for user playlists is possible since #8054 so users should have no problem passing the data to their chosen downloader.

Testing

Regression testing to check that things didn't break:

  • Opening the watch page
  • Opening the settings
  • Choosing the default screenshot folder
  • Taking screenshots with save to the default folder enabled

Desktop

  • OS: Windows
  • OS Version: 11

@FreeTubeBot FreeTubeBot enabled auto-merge (squash) January 18, 2026 20:03
@github-actions github-actions Bot added the PR: waiting for review For PRs that are complete, tested, and ready for review label Jan 18, 2026
@FreeTubeApp FreeTubeApp locked and limited conversation to collaborators Jan 18, 2026
@FreeTubeBot FreeTubeBot merged commit bb93b93 into FreeTubeApp:development Jan 21, 2026
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@github-actions github-actions Bot removed the PR: waiting for review For PRs that are complete, tested, and ready for review label Jan 21, 2026
@absidue absidue deleted the remove-downloading branch January 21, 2026 00:59
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