Schmiddi on Mobile

Pipeline version 4.0.0 was released, overhauling downloading videos completely, and adding a history page. There were also many other changes done, which you can read about in the changelog.
Note that this release contains a breaking change for users of external video players. By default, Pipeline does not ship with the required permissions to spawn external programs anymore. You need to manually grant those permissions, as detailed in the preferences dialog of Pipeline.

https://gitlab.com/schmiddi-on-mobile/pipeline/-/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md?ref_type=heads#400---2026-04-22

In the last few weeks I have spent some time improving Flare, releasing versions 0.19.0 and 0.20.0 (as well as hotfix releases 0.18.5--0.18.8 and 0.19.1). The new versions for example add an indicator if a channel has new messages, and activating the channel now directly jumps to the latest unread message. It also improves on the UI of Flare, e.g. making reactions to look nicer. There have also been lots of other minor improvements and bug fixes, check out the changelog for more details.

Pipeline celebrates its 5th birthday today. To celebrate, I have written a small blog post talking about the history of Pipeline (including a history of icons and screenshots), as well as some plans I have for Pipeline in the future.

https://schmidhuberj.de/2026/03/01/happy-birthday-pipeline.html

Pipeline 3.2.0 was released. This release updates the underlying video player, Clapper, to the latest version. Besides a few other things, this in particular allows specifying options passed to yt-dlp for video playback, including cookies files or extractor arguments.

Note that YouTube playback broke recently. We are working on it. As a temporary workaround, you can add the following string to your extractor arguments: 'youtube:player_client=default,-android_sdkless'.

I've now released version 0.18.0 of Flare. Besides allowing for Flare being used as a primary device, this release contains a critical hotfix that since yesterday (2026-01-13) some messages are not received properly anymore, which got worse today. I urge everyone to upgrade (once the release is on Flathub), and check in with one of their official Signal applications that you have not missed any critical messages.

I've now released version 0.18.0-beta.1 of Flare on flathub-beta. This release includes fixes for using Flare as a primary device, which I have done successfully for a while now. Feel free to test it out and provide feedback. Note that if you want to try it out, I would heavily encourage linking Signal-Desktop to Flare in order to set your profile information and to start new chats. Feel free to give feedback if you have any issues with this beta in the Matrix room or issue tracker.

@erebion@chaos.social Ganze Linien subscriben geht noch nicht, nur einzelne Reisen. Wenn du eine Reise rechts anzeigst kannst du sie erst "bookmarken" und dann die Glocke aktivieren.

@erebion@chaos.social Railway kann dich schon seit Version 2.9.0 über Verspätungen (und Gleiswechsel und ...) benachrichtigen. Natürlich muss Railway währenddessen laufen.

Railway version 2.9.0 was released. This release allows you to get notifications about the current status of the trip, including for example when you will need to transition to the next train, when a train is running late, or when a departure platform changes. It also fixes an error with DB not working anymore. We also updated to the GNOME 49 runtime.

I've released version 3.1.0 of Pipeline. Starting with this release, Pipeline now fetches data about YouTube videos directly from YouTube instead of proxying over Piped. This is due to pretty much no public Piped instances working anymore. If you have a private Piped instance you want to use, you can still switch back to using Piped in the settings. This change also speeds up fetching the feed of videos a lot, for my personal feed by a factor of about 20.

Just an FYI: I'm currently searching for a job. If you think I would be a good fit for your company, please reach out to me.

More information: https://schmidhuberj.de/2025/10/09/searching-for-a-job.

Pipeline version 3.0.0 was released. This release is a major redesign of the UI to be more intuitive as well as adaptive for both desktop and mobile. Huge thanks to @lo@wetdry.world for creating the mockup as well as helping to implement and test this version, as well as @simplyalexander@mastodon.social for the help implementing quite a lot of the updated UI and also testing.

https://gitlab.com/schmiddi-on-mobile/pipeline/-/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md?ref_type=heads#300---2025-08-07

Flare version 0.17.0 was now released. This switches how Flare (or more accurately presage) stores its data to sqlite. This change is not backwards compatible, you will therefore need to relink after updating Flare. This also fixes a bug where contacts were displayed as phone numbers or "Unknown Contact" instead of their profile name.

Pipeline version 2.6.0 was released. This release adds more keyboard shortcuts to the video player. Furthermore, you can now hide the sidebar when viewing a video. Pipeline now also displays a setup window on first startup, allowing the user to import their subscriptions from YouTube or NewPipe, as well as informing the user about privacy implications when using Pipeline. There were also fixes for minor errors, refer to the changelog for more information about those:
https://gitlab.com/schmiddi-on-mobile/pipeline/-/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md?ref_type=heads#260---2025-06-21

Version 2.5.0 of Pipeline was released. Pipeline now displays a random splash text when reloading the feed, informing the user for example about random facts about Pipeline or highlighting some features of Pipeline. "What a useless feature", you might say. I would pretty much agree, but it was fun to code, and maybe some of you will have fun reading the things I came up with.

There were also other changes and bug fixes, for detals refer to the changelog: https://gitlab.com/schmiddi-on-mobile/pipeline/-/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md?ref_type=heads#250---2025-06-14.

Pipeline versions 2.2.0 until 2.2.2 were recently released, reloading your feed seven times faster.

Pipeline now fetches your subscriptions from multiple Piped instances in parallel, bypassing rate limits and spreading load. It also automatically refreshes a list of currently working Piped instances on every startup, such that you don't have to manually search for working instances anymore. Overall, this lead to an improved loading time for my personal feed of a factor of about 7.

Flare version 0.16.0 was released. This release adds supports for stickers.

As the last post about Flare is already over a year old, there were 19 other releases in the meantime. None of them is specifically noteworthy (which is why they were not announced), but together they squash a lot of bugs making Flare overall more reliable and usable. If you already tried Flare once, but ditched it due to reliability issues, now is the best time to try again.