NewPipe e.V.

Meetings

• 04/01 Plenum: election of the new board
• 08/02 Plenum: budget plan, chat rules, trademark policy
• 06/06 Board meeting: policy for conference attendance, FrOSCon organization, assignment of tasks among the board
• 29/06 Board meeting: TeamNewPipe meetup organization, privacy policy discussion
• 06/09 Plenum (in Erlangen!): budget plan revision, handling of job applications
• 23/12 Board meeting: travel cost policy, plans for 39C3 and FOSDEM

Achievements

At the beginning of the year, we collaborated with the NewPipe team to add a donation button to the NewPipe app. And in order to increase donation options, we updated both the e.V. and the NewPipe app websites to list our bank account's IBAN.

We approved a budget plan very early on, making 2025 the first full year where the e.V. had a plan for spending money. This allowed us to pay contractors, travel to conferences, pay for hosting costs, buy merch, etc. A nice visualization of the budget plan is available on the website.

In September we set out to find two freelancers: an Android developer for the NewPipe app, and a system administrator to help TheAssassin manage infrastructure. We therefore setup a contractor hiring process: we first published two opportunities on our website (see a web-archived version here), then reviewed the various candidates and interviewed 2/3 for each role, and finally picked the contractors based on their performance, technical background, and affinity with FOSS values.

We were contacted by Heise who asked us a few questions to make an article about open source maintainers.

Conferences

In 2025 we organized and funded attendance (partially or fully) to 4 events for TeamNewPipe and NewPipe e.V. members. We used Pretix to collect attendance applications, although in hindsight it was probably overkill given the number of applications we got each time.

Attendance to public events pushed TheAssassin and Stypox to make designs for merch to hand out and marketing materials to put on display. Our portfolio of designs now includes banners, coasters, flyers, mugs, rollups, stickers, T-Shirts, and counter wraps.

On February the 1st–2nd, six people went to FOSDEM, which was our first in-person meetup after the founding of the association. There we had the chance to network with many other developers from the Android FOSS community.

Since we had a good time at FOSDEM, we decided to also participate to FrOSCon on August the 16–17th, and to even exhibit with a booth there. We travelled there together with marketing material (banners, rollups, flyers, etc.), demoed NewPipe to many conference attendees, pitched the role of the e.V. to everyone passing by, distributed lots of flyers and stickers and gave out a lot of coasters with the NewPipe logo and information on the e.V. Read more about our journey to FrOSCon here.

A couple weeks later, on September the 4–7th we met again for a self-organized NewPipe team meetup in Erlangen, where we got to work on the NewPipe app and share interesting discussions.

To wrap up the year, a few team members also met at 39C3 in December the 27–30th.

Policies

Right before the start of the validity period of the EU trademark for the "NewPipe" string (see here), we approved a policy to regulate which uses of it we want to allow and forbid. The formulation took into consideration input from NewPipe team members, and is available on the website (thanks Fynn for the intial draft!). We then politely asked a couple of NewPipe-derived projects to change their name, in order to abide by our new policy and create less confusion in users.

Speaking of intellectual property, progress was made on trying to acquire rights over NewPipe's logo from the original author, although some legal details still need to be figured out.

After receiving some negative feedback from users about chat moderation in NewPipe's Matrix chat #newpipe:matrix.newpipe-ev.de, Schabi proposed a chat policy with simple rules that everyone can refer to, which is now available on the website. MrPoseidon volunteered to be the contact person that would handle controversies in the moderation process.

With the wisdom gained from organizing attendance to FOSDEM and FrOSCon, we decided to specify how the e.V. budget for a conference should be distributed among people who want to participate, and whether money could be spent on food. This led to the approval of a rough policy for travel budget distribution (to guide the internal decision process, see the board meeting of 06/06) and later of a comprehensive travel policy (see it on the webite, thanks to Fynn for writing it!).

Some discussion happened around overhauling the privacy policy to allow the e.V. to store information about NewPipe team members, but no agreement has been reached yet.

On a smaller note, we also changed the SEPA mandate form to ask only the minimal amount of information necessary from e.V. members who wish to pay their yearly fees via direct debit.

Bureaucracy

Since the two freelancers we made a contract with are outside of Germany, we had to request a VAT ID to participate in Reverse Charge.

We noticed that the Transparenzregister contained wrong information about one of the team members, and we had to submit an update.

Infrastructure

TheAssassin wonderfully continued maintaining the infrastructure throughout 2025, helped in part by the new contractor towards the end of the year. Some relevant updates are:

• The board now has a ticket system (Zammad) that collects all incoming emails, drastically reducing the chance of missing inquiries or important documents, e.g. receipts/invoices to be uploaded to cloud (to the cash auditor's delight).
• After persisting issues with NetCup's registrar, we switched to INWX.
• Our mailserver configuration had to be changed to send emails via IPv4 instead of IPv6, due to gmail not accepting the IPv6 emails.
• A CiviCRM Standalone installation was setup, but some critical limitations persist so we have not been able to switch over from Admidio yet.
• We set up infrastructure to safely exchange and share passwords.
• We added more articles to the Bookstack knowledge base.
• We prepared to switch to a larger main server and diversify our infrastructure as our demands continue to grow.
• Our website is now generated from a template system, saving us lots of manual effort.

Summary on outgoing donations

During 2025 the e.V. made the following donations:

• 600€/year to Weblate since it allows the community to translate the NewPipe app to other languages effortlessly
• 300€/year to LiberaPay since it allows people to donate to us conveniently
• 600€ to FOSDEM because we attended the conference and the tickets were for free
• 150€ to LuanRT for their research and work on poTokens, which was used in the NewPipe v0.27.6 release

Acknowledgements

The board wishes to wholeheartedly thank the following members, who greatly contributed to the e.V.'s goals. Thanks to TheAssassin for his constant maintenance of the IT infrastructure and for preparing the merch designs. Additionally, thank you to him, Tobi and Schabi for helping in reviewing freelance job applications and holding the interviews, and thank you to the contractors for the collaboration we established. Thanks to Schabi for coming up with a chat policy and MrPoseidon for volunteering to be the contact point for chat moderation controversies. Thanks to Schabi also for organizing the TeamNewPipe meetup, and to TheAssassin for the yummy pizza we had there.

_{Photo: 2025 under magnifying glass by Marco Verch under Creative Commons 2.0}