I Brought My Abandoned Downloader Back to Life: uTube Now Runs on Android, Desktop, and CLI

Description and use

uTube restored functionality to a multi‑platform video downloader, supporting quality selection, playlists, and audio extraction with a shared recovery engine.

Problem

A terminal YouTube downloader broke and was abandoned; the author needed a reliable, multi-platform tool to download public videos from several social media sites.

Outcome

uTube restored functionality across platforms, offering quality‑controlled downloads, playlist handling, and audio extraction, with a shared engine ensuring consistent fixes across interfaces.

Workflow

• 1. Rebuild the project with a shared core engine and separate interfaces (CLI, desktop, Android).
• 2. Implement quality selection with fallback and quiet retries.
• 3. Merge audio and video streams using FFmpeg for MP4 and generate MP3 with metadata.
• 4. Package Android app, desktop preview builds, and publish CLI via npm.
• 5. Provide download links via website and GitHub releases.
• 6. Users install the app or CLI, choose video/audio, quality, and start download.

Evidence

uTube is a free, open-source downloader for public videos from YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and X.

Source

It runs on: 📱 Android, 🖥️ Windows, macOS, and Linux (desktop app, currently a preview), ⌨️ Terminal (CLI).

Source

Downloaders break when platforms change, so the engine is built around recovery: Requested quality first, Best working fallback, Quiet retries, Audio included.

Source

Requires Node.js 20+.
npm install -g utube-cli@latest utube

Source