MetroTube

A minimal Android (API 29+ / Android 10+) YouTube browsing client styled after the old Windows Phone official YouTube client: black background, thin "youtube" wordmark, pivot-style tabs ("what to watch" / "browse"), full-width thumbnails, and the round-icon bottom app bar.

It talks directly to the YouTube Data API v3 using a key you provide — there's no bundled key, no scraping, and no attempt to spoof an official client. On first launch it asks for a key; you can change it later from the overflow (•••) button → Settings.

Why you have to build this yourself

This project was written and assembled in a sandboxed environment that has no Android SDK, no Gradle, and no network access to Google's Maven repository (dl.google.com), which AndroidX/Material/etc. are hosted on. So the source is complete, but it was never actually compiled here — you'll need to build it locally.

Building the APK

Easiest: Android Studio

1. Open Android Studio → Open → select this MetroTube folder.
2. Let it sync Gradle (first sync downloads the SDK platform/build tools if you don't have them yet).
3. Build → Build Bundle(s) / APK(s) → Build APK(s).
4. The APK lands in app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk.
5. Install it: drag onto an emulator, or adb install app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk with a device connected over USB debugging.

From a terminal, if you already have the Android SDK + ANDROID_HOME set:

cd MetroTube
./gradlew assembleDebug
# (if the wrapper jar is missing, run `gradle wrapper` once with a local
# Gradle install to regenerate gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.jar)
adb install app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk

If you only have a Debian terminal and nothing else, the practical path is: install sdkmanager (comes with cmdline-tools) and accept the licenses, sdkmanager "platform-tools" "platforms;android-34" "build-tools;34.0.0", export ANDROID_HOME, then run the Gradle command above. This needs a real network path to dl.google.com and repo.maven.apache.org, which this sandbox's proxy doesn't allow — so do this step on your own machine.

Getting an API key

Settings → api key → paste a key with the YouTube Data API v3 enabled, created in the Google Cloud Console. Free tier is normally enough for casual browsing; heavy use can hit daily quota limits.

What's implemented vs. stubbed

• ✅ First-run setup screen, settings screen, key storage (plain SharedPreferences — swap in EncryptedSharedPreferences if you want it hardened).
• ✅ "What to watch" tab pulls videos?chart=mostPopular.
• ✅ "Browse" tab currently runs a fixed placeholder search query (technology) — wire the search button to an actual query dialog/bar to make it useful.
• ✅ Tapping a video hands off to the YouTube app/browser via an intent rather than embedding a player, to keep this scoped to the browsing UI.
• ⛔ No offline caching, no account/OAuth login, no comments/likes — those need OAuth scopes beyond a simple API key and are left out.