<Advertisement>

:mega: Reply to Google Play Reviews using AI :arrow_right:

Increase your apps ratings. Engage with all users, no more unanswered reviews. Save time and increase customer satisfaction.

</Advertisement>

android-youtube-player

android-youtube-player is a stable and customizable open source YouTube player for Android. It provides a simple View that can be easily integrated in every Activity/Fragment.

The library is a wrapper around the IFrame Player API, which runs inside of a WebView. Therefore there are no issues with YouTube Terms of Service.

This library also provides a Chromecast YouTube player, that you can use to cast YouTube videos from your app to a Chromecast device.

Why does this library exist?

The library provided by Google is the YouTube Android Player API. This library has been historically not reliable and is now deprecated by Google.

Google now recommends using the IFrame Player API inside a WebView, which is exactly what this library does, while also providing a native Java/Kotlin interface to interact with the web player.

A lengthier explanation of why this library was created can be found in this Medium post.

Who is using this library

Now that the official API from Google is deprecated, android-youtube-player is the main YouTube player library for Android.

Used by over 5 thousands apps, with some big names like Tumblr, Flipkart, McDonald's, InShot Video Editor, Genius and reddit is fun.

You can see more stats here.

If you choose to use this library and profit from it, consider informing me and become a sponsor on GitHub. This will enable me to continue developing the library, so you don't have to.

Does this library break YouTube terms of service?

TL;DR No.

The library uses YouTube's own web player to play videos. Therefore it is 100% compliant with terms of service. Playing YouTube videos in a WebView is the recommended approach by Google, both on Android and iOS.

That said how you use the library matters, be sure to play videos only when the player is visible. If you follow the instructions in the documentation, the library will automatically handle this for you.

Also remember when publishing your app on the PlayStore to write title and description in a way that makes it obvious that your app doesn't have any affiliation with YouTube (the company). This issue has nothing to do with the library itself, but I figured it may be useful knowledge for many of you considering to use it.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗