What's new

August 3, 2026

Bad news up front, and share straight from other apps

If a site downloot checks is having trouble, the home page now says so before you paste — a small amber strip with the same plain-English line as Robby's vitals. No more discovering an outage by watching your own download fail.

On Android, downloot is now a share target: install it from your browser menu ("Add to home screen"), and "Share → downloot" from TikTok, YouTube or anywhere else drops the link straight into the loot bar and starts sniffing. No more copy, switch, paste.

The privacy page also got more specific — including exactly what a link report sends us (the link and the error code; your settings never leave your browser).

August 3, 2026

A tidier header: three buttons, one home for everything

The header was collecting controls the way Robby collects loot: help, theme, sound, the 18+ switch, a menu… six things fighting for a strip of phone screen. It's now three: the menu (how it works, every downloader, every page), the theme toggle (still one tap — some things deserve the front row), and the settings gear (everything else: sound, 18+, default quality and format).

Nothing was removed — sound and the 18+ switch just moved into settings, where your choices were already being remembered. The footer got the same treatment: the things you reach for in the moment first, the reference pages after.

August 3, 2026

See a link fail that should work? Tell us in one tap

Error screens now have a small "This link should work — report it" button. One tap sends us the link and the error you saw — nothing else, nothing about you — and sites that rack up reports jump our queue.

Not every failure is ours to fix (private videos, deleted posts and typo'd links fail on a perfectly healthy day), but when a site genuinely breaks, your reports are how we find out faster. Between this, the hourly site checks and Robby's vitals, a breakage now has three ways to get caught.

August 3, 2026

Set it once: downloot now remembers how you like your loot

There's a new settings panel behind the gear icon. Tell downloot once that you always want audio as MP3, or video capped at 1080p to save data, and every link you paste starts from that choice — one paste, one click, done.

The quality setting is a ceiling, not a promise: if a link tops out lower than your preference, you simply get its best. And it's only the starting selection — every download still shows all the formats, so you can override any time.

Settings are saved in your browser only. downloot has no accounts, and your preferences never leave your device.

August 3, 2026

A page for what's new

You're reading it. downloot now has a proper updates page — written by us, for you. When something changes, gets better, or breaks, this is where we'll say so in plain English. No commit hashes, no jargon.

We've back-filled the story so far below, including the parts where things broke. Every site downloot saves from changes constantly, and a downloader that pretends it never breaks is lying to you. The honest version of this page is the useful one.

For whether downloot is working right now, check Robby's vitals. This page is the longer story.

August 2, 2026

TikTok broke quietly. It's fixed — and it can't break quietly again

TikTok downloads stopped working for about a day while everything else stayed green. The cause was deep in the plumbing: TikTok turns away connections that don't look like they come from a real browser, and the library we use for that disguise had silently drifted to a version our engine refuses to use. No error, no alarm — just every TikTok link failing.

It's fixed, and we changed two things so it stays fixed. The disguise library is now installed in lockstep with the engine, so the two can't drift apart again. And downloot now checks its own disguise on a timer — if it ever goes missing, we find out from a dashboard within minutes instead of from your failed download.

One detail for the curious: TikTok answers a Chrome-shaped request with a page our engine can't read, but answers a Safari-shaped one perfectly, every time. So downloot now introduces itself to TikTok as Safari. 🎩

August 2, 2026

A 1984 Macintosh theme

The theme toggle now cycles light → dark → terminal. Terminal isn't a color swap — it's a full 1-bit Macintosh System 1 redesign: bitmap type, dithered shading, the app in a titled window on the classic desktop pattern, and Robby rendered in pure black and white. Even the confetti goes monochrome.

It's completely unnecessary and we love it. Tap the theme button twice from light mode to try it.

August 1, 2026

A public status page, wider desktops, and stubborner retries

When a link fails, the first question is: is it me, or is it downloot? Robby's vitals now answers that in one sentence, above the fold. It shows whether downloot can currently reach each of the big sites, checked about every hour — linked from the footer, right where you are when a download just failed.

The app also stopped pretending every screen is a phone: on big displays the layout now breathes properly. And the sites that fail intermittently for no reason (looking at you, TikTok and X) now get a couple of quiet retries before we ever show you an error.

July 28, 2026

downloot learned to fix itself

Sites break downloaders all the time — that's the business. The fixes usually ship within days in the open-source engine we build on. downloot now closes that gap by itself: when it recognizes the fingerprint of a broken site extractor, it fetches the newest engine build, verifies it actually works, swaps it in live, and retries your download. You get a slow success instead of an error, usually without anyone touching anything.

We also rewrote our error messages. You will never again see raw engine output (once upon a time a failed Instagram link told you to "report this issue" to a project you'd never heard of — sorry about that). And we stopped telling people a public video was "private": that message was YouTube suspecting our server of being a bot, which is our problem to solve, not yours.

The embarrassing one: in mid-July, TikTok (and most other sites) failed for almost a week — and the actual culprit was our own proxy, which sat in front of every request and had died. Only YouTube ever needed it. The proxy is now scoped to just the sites that require it, and a circuit breaker routes around it automatically if it dies. That particular outage is structurally impossible now.

Finally, downloot now probes each major site every hour, so when something breaks we usually know before you do.

July 21, 2026

Faster sniffing, a loot counter, and save-to-Photos

Pasting a link now identifies the media noticeably faster — we cut a chunk of latency out of the sniffing step.

The footer now shows the all-time loot counter: every download downloot has ever served. It keeps counting whether or not you're watching.

On phones: downloads can now go straight to your photo library instead of a downloads folder, and the page no longer zooms in when you tap the link box.

July 8, 2026

Robby Run gets a leaderboard

The little runner behind the app is now a proper competition: all-time and daily leaderboards, nicknames, and share cards that show off your rank. Scores are validated by replaying your run on the server, so the leaderboard stays honest — nice try though.

Also new: a coin-burst celebration when your download lands, because a plain progress bar hitting 100% never made anyone smile.

June 24, 2026

Why we don't run ads

downloot got an About page and a Privacy page, which mostly exist to say one thing clearly: no ads, no "PRO" plan, no accounts, no selling data — ever. Every other downloader we tried was a minefield of fake download buttons and pop-ups, and the entire reason downloot exists is to be the opposite of that.

It runs on coffee instead. Optional, appreciated.

June 18, 2026

downloot is born

Paste a link from YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, X, Reddit and 1800+ other sites — downloot sniffs out the real media file and hands it to you. Pick your resolution, or take just the audio as MP3. Free, ad-free, no sign-up.

And because big downloads take a moment, there's a raccoon. Press space while you wait and Robby sets off across a pixel city — double-jumping trash cans, dodging pest control, grabbing loot. We'd rather hand you a few seconds of delight than a banner ad.