Potential Download fix?

[ShiveringSheo]

Downloading with the app script usually ends with failure or at the very least a few kb file that's useless. But I've randomly stumbled across the download for the Newpipe apk on their website which for some reason downloads the roughly 10 mb file perfectly every time. I'm not sure if it's reproducible on other devices, but if it's not a fluke, maybe whatever is allowing this can be investigated and used for a broader fix?

Here's the website for the download:
https://newpipe.net/#download

[idkidonttell-lgtm]

when the scripts gives a call, it has a total of 50mb size. so you can download anything that is under 50mb for roughly 30 seconds, if your internet is slow and 30 seconds pass, the download fails
same with the size being more than 50mb
unless you wanna use the telegram workaround

[ShiveringSheo]

Thanks for clarifying! Could you perhaps point me towards a guide on the telegram workaround?

Edit: nvm found the guide. Unfortunately don't have a VPS to use it

[therealaleph]

@ShiveringSheo — interesting data point. NewPipe's APK download from newpipe.net works reliably through the Apps Script relay because:

1. They serve a small file (~10 MB). Apps Script's per-fetch body cap is 50 MB and per-account daily quota is 20k fetches — a single 10 MB GET is one fetch, well under both ceilings.
2. No Range chunking required. Most failed downloads are large files (≥100 MB) where browsers issue parallel Range requests for chunks; mhrv-rs doesn't currently parallelize Range across the relay (the simple impl would multiply quota use), so each Range gets serialized. Single-shot small downloads bypass that.
3. Direct origin server, not a CDN edge. newpipe.net serves the APK directly. CDN-fronted downloads (Cloudflare, Akamai) often fail because they detect Apps Script's Google-Apps-Script User-Agent + the unusual request pattern as bot traffic.

So you've found the sweet spot: small files (<10-20 MB) from non-CDN origins should generally work. Larger files or CDN-served files will keep failing until we ship Range parallelism (issue #308 tracks this — currently deprioritized because Full mode + VPS handles arbitrary downloads end-to-end without quota implications).

If you regularly need large-file downloads through mhrv-rs, Full mode with a $5/mo VPS is the right architecture — see docs/guide.md#full-tunnel-mode.

Closing — leaving the Range work in #308 as the canonical thread for the larger investigation.

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_{[reply via Anthropic Claude | reviewed by @therealaleph]}

[idkidonttell-lgtm]

@ShiveringSheo you don't need a VPS, just look at issue #541 and see what i've said there