About PurePlay
A small, independent project with one goal: a player that opens the files you already own, on the phone you already have, without asking you to sign up for anything.
Why another player?
Android already ships with a video player, and there are dozens in the Play Store. Most of them are built around something other than playing files: streaming catalogues, subscriptions, cloud lockers, or advertising. Meanwhile the honest use case — a folder full of downloaded films, camera recordings and music — keeps running into the same three problems: the file "cannot be played", the subtitles are out of sync, or the app is watching you.
PurePlay exists to solve those three problems and stop there. It uses LibVLC, the open-source engine from the VLC project, so format support is a solved problem. It is designed as a local app first: your library, your playback history and your settings stay on your device. And it has no account system, because a player does not need one.
What we changed compared with traditional VLC-based apps
PurePlay is not a fork of the VLC for Android application. The application layer — screens, settings, library, gestures — is written from scratch for this project. The playback engine is LibVLC, dynamically linked and used unmodified under the LGPL. This matters for two reasons: users get VLC-grade format support, and the project can keep an original, focused interface instead of inheriting a decade of accumulated menus.
How the project is funded
PurePlay has no ads inside the app, no paid tier and no data business. The costs — development, code signing, and hosting this site — are covered by advertising on this website only. That distinction is deliberate: ads on a website you choose to visit, never on top of a video you are trying to watch.
Licensing and trademarks
- LibVLC is licensed under the LGPL-2.1 and is used as a dynamically linked library. The licence text and instructions for obtaining the corresponding source are available in the app (Settings → About → Open-source licences) and on request.
- AndroidX and Material Components are licensed under Apache-2.0.
- VLC is a trademark of VideoLAN. PurePlay is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by VideoLAN.
Contact
Questions, bug reports or press enquiries: see the contact page. For playback problems, the support page answers the most common ones first.