Among the plethora of Android apps out there, one unique offering crops up every now and then to surprise us with its abilities. InsTube belongs to that league, and we’ll be giving you a full lowdown on it through this review. It’s a pretty simple Android app which is meant to provide you with the ability to download videos and music from YouTube and other streaming sites, thus enabling you to enjoy them even when there’s no Internet connection at hand. And you can also save your precious data this way.
Apart from helping you grab videos, InsTube also happens to be a music downloader; but we’ll get to that part soon. To acquire this app, you need to head to its website and download the APK file as it’s not available on the Google Play store. Once installed, it presents you with a clean interface consisting mainly of icons of popular streaming websites. You can enter those sites from right within InsTube to start grabbing content from them.
A very useful feature is that the app acts as a browser, thus allowing you to sign into your accounts on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo and other websites. This helps you easily find the exact video you are looking for, as your personal feed becomes accessible. Once you’ve found it, all you need to do is tap on the little red bolt icon at the bottom.
This opens up a menu showing the format and resolution options. MP4 and 3GP are the two video formats supported, and the app even displays the resultant sizes of the files, helping you to decide the ideal resolution based on the storage situation on your phone.
Like we mentioned earlier, InsTube can also be utilized for free music downloads. Effectively, this is nothing but the ability to download just the audio of a particular clip. So any music video on YouTube can be downloaded in the form of an MP3 or M4A file. But of course, other websites are also supported, including SoundCloud which is one of the most popular portals to download music.
Aside from the regular list of streaming websites, InsTube also supports adult portals. You’re probably thinking that it calls for the need to hide the downloaded videos, right? The app has this covered as well. A Private Space section exists within the My Files category, which asks you to set a four-digit password for accessing its contents.
This feature ensures all your private videos are password protected. As for the question of how to make a particular video private, all you need to do is tap on it and select the Hide option. Sharing a video is also simple, as a dedicated button is available for the same, right next to every video you’ve downloaded via InsTube.
Several optimizations have gone into InsTube which enable it to offer faster downloads of videos than similar other services. And this is quite easily visible when you use it, as small five minute videos get downloaded in a matter of seconds if a good enough Internet connection is at hand. A cool little animation also appears in the notification shade while a video is being grabbed.
InsTube can be downloaded and used free of cost, but you will encounter a fair share of advertisements while doing so. There’s still no option of making an in-app purchase to remove those ads. If such a choice does get added in the future, it will be well worth paying for, given the spectacular offerings of this app.
That being said, InsTube can be downloaded right now through its official website free of cost.