Google can block YouTube wherever it wishes because their YouTube clients are either:

- first-party, so they make them on platforms where they wish to be present on, and conversely withdraw from platforms on which they no longer wish to be present; or,

- third-party, such they are bound by the YouTube API Services Terms of Service [1], which reserves their right to terminate any client for specifically enumerated reasons, or any or no reason at all.

[1] https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/api-services-ter...

There are clients like Newpipe[1] that directly parse the Youtube website instead of using the API.

[1]: https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/

I'm a big user of NewPipe. They have features for free that the YouTube app would make you pay for, such as listening to audio only in the background, removing ads. Plus many other useful features such as having a scaled down video display in front of other apps and downloading video/audio to listen later offline.

I think the ideas is that Google has less of a reason to block Youtube on the Roku because they don't compete in any meaningful way.