// the find
JunkFood02/Seal
🦭 Video/Audio Downloader for Android, based on yt-dlp
Seal is an Android front end for yt-dlp — download video or audio from any site yt-dlp supports, with playlist support, subtitle embedding, and metadata tagging on extracted audio. It's for Android users who want a no-terminal yt-dlp experience, especially people avoiding Play Store (it ships on F-Droid).
Single-activity, no-fragments Compose architecture (MAD-compliant) keeps the codebase in one consistent style rather than the fragment/Compose hybrid mess a lot of Android apps end up with. It does more than wrap a binary: aria2c is embedded as an external downloader for actual multi-connection speed, and mutagen handles embedding thumbnails/metadata into extracted audio files, which yt-dlp alone won't do cleanly on Android. Custom yt-dlp command templates mean power users aren't stuck with whatever presets the UI exposes. Translation is handled through Weblate with real community uptake (a dozen+ languages in the repo), not just auto-translated strings.
The codebase is carrying two parallel download implementations side by side (Downloader.kt/DownloadPage vs DownloaderV2.kt/DownloadPageV2/Task/TaskFactory) — looks like an in-progress rewrite that hasn't fully replaced the old path, which is confusing for a new contributor trying to figure out which one to touch. Test coverage is effectively nothing: the only test file is the default empty ExampleInstrumentedTest.kt, so a 30k-star app with this much surface area (download queue, cookies, format selection, backup/restore) has no safety net against regressions. It's fundamentally tied to yt-dlp's extractor updates — when a site changes its player and yt-dlp needs a patch, Seal is broken until that upstream release lands, and there's no fallback. The README's own license clause warning off unofficial forks using the Seal name suggests this project has already dealt with clone/trademark headaches, which is a sign of the friction that comes with this category of app rather than a code issue.