// the find
KRTirtho/spotube
🎧 Open source music streaming app! Available for both desktop & mobile!
Spotube is a cross-platform music player (Flutter, desktop + mobile) that sources audio from YouTube/other backends via a plugin system, using Spotify or MusicBrainz for metadata. It's the app you use when you want Spotify's catalog without the subscription — no account required for playback, no telemetry, tracks are locally controlled. Aimed at users who want full control over their music stack without paying for streaming.
Plugin architecture using Hetu script lets users swap audio sources without recompiling — that's a real architectural win for staying alive when YouTube changes its API. Native Flutter throughout (not Electron), with mpv/media_kit as the playback backend, so performance is actually good. The drift schema versioning (10 migrations tracked) shows unusual discipline for a solo-maintained app — local DB upgrades don't brick installs. Distribution coverage is impressive: Flatpak, AUR, Homebrew, Chocolatey, Scoop, WinGet, F-Droid, and direct APK — they've clearly handled the 'how do I install this' complaint thoroughly.
iOS is sideload-only via AltStore IPA — not App Store, likely never will be given the YouTube audio extraction. That's a real ceiling on adoption for iPhone users. Releases every 3–4 months is slow for an app whose core dependency (YouTube extraction) breaks constantly when YouTube changes its endpoint behavior; the nightly channel exists precisely because the stable channel is often broken. The plugin system uses Hetu, an embedded scripting language with minimal community outside this project — writing or debugging plugins requires learning something almost no one else uses. The dependency list is 80+ packages long, which means the build surface is large and upgrades are painful; you can see this in the FVM pinning and the number of GitHub-sourced forks in pubspec.