Free Android app Seal saves videos and music for offline use

A free Android app called Seal lets people save videos and music from sites like YouTube, Twitch and SoundCloud to their phone, then watch or listen offline. Android Police reviewer Akshay Bhalla says it has no ads, no subscriptions and no telemetry, which means it does not quietly collect data about how it is used. He found it the most reliable option he tried.

How it works

Seal is a friendly front end for yt-dlp, a command-line tool commonly used to download videos from social media. A command-line tool is one you control by typing instructions. Seal puts buttons on top of it. The reviewer says there is little technical know-how involved. Copy a link from a platform, paste it into Seal, and the app does the rest.

There are two modes. General mode is for everyday use. Custom Command mode is for power users who want finer control over yt-dlp.

What it can do

• Download video or audio only, which suits spoken-word podcasts that do not need the picture.
• Save 4K video from YouTube when the video offers it, and top audio quality from SoundCloud.
• Embed subtitles into the video file and download YouTube thumbnails.
• Play MP3, M4A, FLAC and OPUS files.

The reviewer uses it while traveling, to catch esports matches on Twitch that fall at awkward hours, and to keep long DJ sets from SoundCloud for runs. Offline files save data and battery, and there is no waiting on a stream to buffer where the signal is weak.

What to know first

Seal is not in the Play Store. It is only on F-Droid, an app store for open source software, and on GitHub, a code-sharing site. Installing from those sources is called sideloading, and the reviewer notes it may put off some people.

Other limits came up in the review:

• Seal works best with public links and can falter with private ones.
• There is no built-in browser, so links must be copied from another app.
• There is no vault, so downloads can fill up the phone's gallery.
• YouTube and similar services keep changing, so Seal can break until the next yt-dlp update arrives.

What is not covered

The review is one person's experience. It does not say whether saving a given video is allowed under each site's rules, so users should check those terms themselves. It also does not say how long outages usually last when YouTube changes something.