Revert the default view to "Trending" as opposed to "Live" - Google never actually fully discontinued the combined trending (read thread)

[EspoTek]

Checklist

• I made sure that there are no existing issues - open or closed - which I could contribute my information to.
• I have read the FAQ and my problem isn't listed.
• I'm aware that this is a request for NewPipe itself and that requests for adding a new service need to be made at NewPipeExtractor.
• I have taken the time to fill in all the required details. I understand that the feature request will be dismissed otherwise.
• This issue contains only one feature request.
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Feature description

Revert the default view to "Trending" as opposed to "Live".

Why do you want this feature?

On the 11th of July 2025, Google announced that they would be deprecating the YouTube "Trending" feature and replacing it instead with separate streams such as "Trending Gaming" and "Trending Music":
https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/356702168/changes-to-discovering-trending-content-on-youtube

In response to this announcement, a community poll was run asking people which stream should be shown by default on the main page:
#12445
The general sentiment from the users was that since there was no longer a combined view, "Live" was the least worst option.

Thus, in NewPipe 2.80 (released July 20, 2025), the default view when opening the main page was changed from "Trending" to "Live", alongside with a popup explaining that since there was no longer a combined trending page, the default page has been changed to show live streams:

This seems very sensible at first, however there is one tiny issue:
Google never actually discontinued the combined trending page!

It's still part of their API docs, right here:
https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/revision_history

Specifically:

As of July 21, 2025, YouTube will adjust the content that is returned by the [video.list](https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/guides/implementation/videos) method's mostPopular chart.
In the past, the mostPopular chart reflected the videos featured on the Trending Now list.
Now, the mostPopular chart will feature videos from the Trending Music, Movies, and Gaming charts.
This API change is in tandem with the deprecation of YouTube's Trending page.

(To be fair, it's not quite as rich as the old trending page, but a combination of Music, Movies and Gaming still serves basically the same function.)

Old versions of NewPipe will show this combined movies/music/games trending list by default on their homepages, and if you manually select the "Trending" page from the menu in v2.80, you'll be greeted with the following (sensible) feed:

Compare and contrast with the "Live" page:

Absolute chalk and cheese in terms of quality of results!

Additional information

No response

[weole]

Just wanted to add to this saying the amount of political brainrot livestreams that show up on there is honestly mind-boggling.

[hollownights]

Yeah, having the Live tab as the default main tab was a bad move, as livestreams are also a known and popular scams vector:

From 2022: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-61749120

From 2023: https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/labs/a-deep-dive-into-stream-jacking-attacks-on-youtube-and-why-theyre-so-popular

From 2024: https://mashable.com/article/fake-elon-musk-crypto-scam-youtube-livestreams

From 2025: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/fake-nvidia-gtc-stream-hosting-jensen-huang-deepfake-crypto-scam-garners-100-000-youtube-viewers-video-was-even-promoted-above-nvidias-real-event

[lun-4]

I've been running a Piped instance (which then runs NewPipeExtractor, etc) and I found that the the trending tab on my older Piped jar broke as of at least November 11, 2025, 2255UTC (there's some caching so the actual breakage might have started earlier in the day).

that forced me to get a new build of Piped which then uses the livestream trending which is quite low quality as mentioned in the issue. I don't know much about youtube's api to confirm (nor have enough time to confirm old NewPipe builds), but I'm led to believe that this time the old API is actually gone for good.

[hollownights]

Indeed. Maybe 12 hours ago I noticed that the Trending page was not loading anymore in NewPipe 0.27.7. I just tested it again and it's still not working and also doesn't work in FreeTube. I guess it is dead dead now. How convenient...

NewPipe can not parse the Music, Games, News, Sports, Courses and Podcasts pages/"channels" (FreeTube can't parse some of them), so maybe this is the new way to go: make it able to parse all of those pages (taking into account the country set by the user, something FreeTube doesn't do) and allow the user to set any of them as default. What do you say, @EspoTek ? NewPipe does have some of those pages on the sidebar menu, but you can't set any of them as default (can you? I'm now on version 0.28.0, but I couldn't find where) and none of them can be parsed when you try to access them by pasting their URLs in the search bar and hitting search.

[lun-4]

NewPipeExtractor can get some pages here: https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor/blob/59b620c9237b46f9604422e11ab0052614888523/extractor/src/main/java/org/schabi/newpipe/extractor/services/youtube/YoutubeService.java#L168

        final ListLinkHandlerFactory runningLivesLHF =
                YoutubeLiveLinkHandlerFactory.INSTANCE;
        final ListLinkHandlerFactory trendingPodcastsEpisodesLHF =
                YoutubeTrendingPodcastsEpisodesLinkHandlerFactory.INSTANCE;
        final ListLinkHandlerFactory trendingGamingVideosLHF =
                YoutubeTrendingGamingVideosLinkHandlerFactory.INSTANCE;
        final ListLinkHandlerFactory trendingMoviesAndShowsLHF =
                YoutubeTrendingMoviesAndShowsTrailersLinkHandlerFactory.INSTANCE;
        final ListLinkHandlerFactory trendingMusicLHF =
                YoutubeTrendingMusicLinkHandlerFactory.INSTANCE;

I'm using that fact to create a very non-upstreamable patch just to make my trending page better since I use the Piped API: lun-4/Piped-Backend@177729c. would be a matter of making the app expose those as a default page setting

[EspoTek]

Had a quick look, it doesn't look like the API itself changed.
Checked NewPipe (0.2.8) and FreeTube (0.23.12 ARM macOS) and the trending page loaded fine on both of them.

I think there was maybe just some temporary glitch.

[hollownights]

Not sure how you are getting anything, cause both FreeTube and all popular Invidious instances can't load the Trending page anymore (status code 400). They all load the "Popular" page, though, but that's quite different from the Trending page.

[hollownights]

Well, who would have thought that following the instructions in the pop-up message would allow you to set the default trending page? Settings>Content>Content of main page>"+" button>Kiosk page>"Select a kiosk" menu pops up, with the different trending pages that are available to be chosen right now.

Of course, this doesn't change the fact that, despite being able to have some of those new trending pages as the app's "kiosk", you still can't access those pages directly and the News, Sports and Courses pages are still missing. All of those pages, taken individually, pale in comparison to the original Trending page, too. (Had never thought much about it, but "kiosk" for the main page is also a weird word choice)

[Stypox]

I am pretty sure it's gone for good now, it's been unavailable for a month or more. Closing this issue.

Thanks @hollownights for finding duplicates!