Musi[1] is what I use for playing in the background on iOS.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/musi-simple-music-streaming/id...

Musi does work well for playing music in the background on iOS.

A downside to Musi is that after playing a video a full screen ad will often pop up in a way that feels invasive and can be difficult to avoid inadvertently clicking. The behavior feels like malware, which leaves me concerned that the developers behind the app might hold flexible ethics and engage in practices such as covertly monetizing user data.

I'm not sure that Apple would ban it. Do they really care if people bypass YouTube's intended restrictions? Obviously Google cares, so you won't be seeing NewPipe on the Play Store.

Apple is in bed with major scummy companies like Google when it comes to the Apple Store and has removed alternative clients in the past.

> #5 in Music > Stream any song from YouTube

Wow and it's been up for years! Do they scrape YouTube like NewPipe? How come Google didn't go nuts about taking it down?

With iOS Safari you can change the YouTube website setting to always request the desktop site. Then if you press the home button while a video is playing, pull up control center within 5 seconds and press play you have background playback.

There is also a ton of ad blockers for Safari which block YouTube ads.

Um. Consider the Official YouTube app, with a paid YouTube Premium subscription.

>(and you can choose whether to download them as audio files)

Videos with still images (many songs) shouldn't be much data at all over the audio alone.

>Um.

Nit: Not sure what this is supposed to mean. Is this an attempt to mimic how you speak aloud?

>Consider the Official YouTube app, with a paid YouTube Premium subscription.

That is definitely an option, but people who use things like youtube-dl or apps like NewPipe probably aren't in the target audience for YouTube Premium.

>Videos with still images (many songs) shouldn't be much data at all over the audio alone.

Part of the point is if you never intend to watch the content, but only want to listen to it, there's no point to having video.

> Nit: Not sure what this is supposed to mean. Is this an attempt to mimic how you speak aloud?

It's to add condescension.

>It's to add condescension.

That was my assumption. Things like "um" and "uh" tend to be silence-fillers, among other things (see below). It's weird to see them being typed-out, and I've noted an uptick in how often I see it being done.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_disfluency

> I've noted an uptick in how often I see it being done

Yep.

There's something about internet culture that rots our ability to have conversations with others. It's something I've also noticed in myself (it's easy to complain about everyone else) as someone who, sheepishly, has snuck in a juvenile "Um..." when I think I've really got'em good.

I suspect the uptick in just this sort of rot going mainstream. Like instead of bringing your in-person social skills online when the internet was newer, and then becoming corrupted over time, people are just born into the rot from a young age.

And frankly it takes eternal vigilance to stay a noncombative and fair online.

Yes. That is true too. :)

> Is this an attempt to mimic how you speak aloud?

Of course.

> ...probably aren't in the target audience for YouTube Premium.

True. It's unclear if OP fits that description though. Re-read OP's comment.

> ...there's no point to having video.

Agreed. I think it most cases, there is no video for still image YouTube content. Just, you know, a still image. I don't know the extent this is true, nor do I know OP's use case. Assuming that OP is interested in music, the video component shouldn't be a real issue. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6007071?hl=en

The official app doesn't support 3x speed playback.

My brain doesn't either :)

Hah, it depends on the video/podcast I'm watching/listening to for sure, but sometimes 2.5x/3x is very nice.

I think I sort of built it up over time though, I remember not being able to do 2x previously because it seemed to fast, but I guess I got used to it.

I can barely do 2x, I should practice then! Depends a lot on the speaker too.

Many (most?) vision impaired people can.

i was once told vision impared people can do much faster than that if it's a flat computerised voice. so i started reading articles like that for a while. i had to do a bunch of manual/automatic handling, but i got it up to super fast speeds and i could read it thrice in less than the time it took to read it once. not bad!

What can Google's app do what NewPipe can't?

I don't know what all NewPipe or Vanced can do, and I don't know what all YouTube's apps can do. I mostly indicated that OP's desired features were covered by the official app (without possibly downloading the audio track from a video file). I'm certainly not making an argument that NewPipe is any better or worse.

Download a playlist to listen offline without having to download each song individually/manually :)

Edit: I'm a very, very happy new pipe user, this is literally the one feature I'm waiting for. And there is a GitHub issue being worked on for it.

Support content creators?

It seems like NewPipe can't even add an option to enable ads because third-party ads are against F-Droid policy.

I think you're allowed to do third party ads (as long you can display them without running proprietrary code...).

support the creators

You mean "expose the user to emotional manipulation through ads. That is not a feature, unless it's opt-in. A donation button or something like that would be.

You opt-in when you decide you want to consume content made with effort by the creator and hosted with effort by youtube. In a lot of countries, you have an option to opt out of "emotional manupulation through ads" by subscribing to youtube premium.

You don't understand what "opt-in" means or you're pretending you don't.

lots of people pretend they don't understand in this thread