And newpipe lets you download videos, stream and play them using an external audio or video player, has a built in background and popup player, lacks ads and is open source.

And is on F-Droid. Also supports other services including PeerTube. I probably forgot other useful features. Always irks me a little when people recommend Vanced.

> And is on F-Droid

I use F-Droid whenever I can but only for NewPipe I started to actively avoid it. YouTube occasionally changes it's HTML and breaks NewPipe, the app starts crashing and while it usually gets fixed quickly and the apk gets uploaded to GitHub, F-Droid still takes weeks to update it. Last update was about 2 weeks late, that's when I uninstalled the F-Droid version and started installing it directly from the GitHub releases page. Unfortunately for time critical bug fixes F-Droid still has a lot to improve.

A useful feature you forgot is the AMOLED theme. Also subscribing to channels without having to use a YouTube account.

You could add this repository to get the latest github releases: https://archive.newpipe.net/fdroid/repo/

Some ongoing discussion on this issue thread here. https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/1981

Thank you very much for that! I didn't know they had their own repository.

What's so good about PeerTube? Never heard of it

newpie is excellent, I switched last year and never looked back. It offers exactly the features, that I as a user want. It made me realize afterwards in how many ways the official app is lacking.

Somewhat related self advertising. I made this tiny tool that lets you take a YouTube playlist or channel and turn it into a podcast RSS that works with any podcast listening app that still supports RSS sources. And the final audio URLs are pointing to YouTube anyway.

https://github.com/naugtur/handsfreeyoutube

Last I tried it, there was no way to sign in and get personalized recommendations. Is that still true (or did I just miss it)?

That is by Design. You can add you subscriptions in xml formar and have newpipe fetch the new video list for you, but newpipe will by design not interface with anything google.

Wow! Thanks for the tip! I've been using YouTube on Firefox mobile in order to avoid the ads. This looks like it could be a better experience.

Is there a similar project for iOS?

Firefox Preview / Firefox both can run uBlock Origin + EFF Privacy Badger and work very well with Youtube's mobile website. The only thing I notice that is missing is Chromecast integration, but I fine living without that.

Upside is one less native app on my devices.

Why is having one less native app an upside? From my experience, mobile websites are much more cumbersome than native apps, especially in this case because NewPipe is so much better than the YouTube mobile website.

Native Apps have more permissions to your system, like running in the background, information about your device, storage and code execution. Running a 3rd party Native Application to get around Youtube ads requires a lot of trust that that application does not have malicious behaviors.

Invidious (https://github.com/omarroth/invidious) is a server-side proxy for YouTube that removes all the bullshit (ads, background play restrictions, etc) while requiring no client-side support (so no need for side loading and will work on iOS).

There is a hosted instance at https://invidio.us if you want to check it out, but for continuous usage I highly recommend deploying your own as it's much faster.

If you deploy it yourself and you're pretty much the only user of your instance, don't you loose the anonymization benefit of a proxy?

Why should I trust the creators of YouTube Vanced? Last time I looked, it was closed source.

It's a modified version of the official YouTube app, which is also closed source.

It doesn't really affect whether you can trust it or not, but it's probably unreasonable to expect them to deliver something they don't have.

They can publish their methods so everyone can reproduce their builds. I don't expect them to have the source to the original app. But I am expecting them do give me a reason to trust them.

It seems it only works by casting to another screen. And the app itself is hypocritically overflowing with ads more intrusive than YouTube ads...