Remove broken download functionality#8543
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ChunkyProgrammer
approved these changes
Jan 18, 2026
efb4f5ff-1298-471a-8973-3d47447115dc
approved these changes
Jan 19, 2026
PikachuEXE
approved these changes
Jan 21, 2026
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Pull Request Type
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:
Desktop