// the find
team-spotube/spotube
🎧 Open source music streaming app! Available for both desktop & mobile!
Spotube is a Flutter-based cross-platform music player (desktop, mobile) that pulls audio from YouTube/Piped/Invidious via yt-dlp/NewPipeExtractor while sourcing metadata from Spotify-like catalogs, MusicBrainz, and LastFM. It's aimed at people who want a free, ad-free, Spotify-shaped listening experience without paying for a subscription or running an Electron blob.
The plugin system genuinely decouples audio-source and metadata providers from the app core, so a broken extractor or a dead API doesn't sink the whole project — community plugins can patch around it. Playback runs on media_kit (mpv-backed), so it's actually native performance instead of a webview pretending to be a media player. It ships one Dart/Flutter codebase across Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS with real per-platform packaging (deb/rpm/AUR/Flatpak/choco/winget), which is a lot of distribution work most side projects skip. 49k stars and steady 3-4 month releases over years show this isn't a repo that gets abandoned after the initial HN spike.
The entire value prop rests on scraping/extracting YouTube through yt-dlp and NewPipeExtractor — that's a permanently adversarial relationship with Google, and when they change something server-side, playback breaks for everyone until a plugin update lands. iOS support is IPA-sideload-only via AltStore, so 'cross-platform' really means four platforms plus one asterisk. The license is BSD-4-Clause, which includes the old advertising clause — that's GPL-incompatible and a real annoyance for anyone trying to bundle or fork this commercially, worth knowing before you build on it. Test coverage looks thin for the surface area: the tree shows a single integration_test/app_test.dart and no visible unit/widget test directory, which is light for an app juggling plugins, drift migrations (10 schema versions), and multi-platform audio backends.