Even then, most apps are just thinly veiled webapps for which the site (with Firefox and uBlock) provides the same or superior experience, ad-free.

Except when said web site detects your mobile web browser, and serves a page telling you to download their app instead.

That's half of the point of having uBlock Origin. Use the zapper to disappear an element for the session, use the picker to poof them forever. They really work on making their webapps as unbearable as possible, but you can get rid of it to make them webapps great again. Can even add sites/pages as home app icons.

Which makes Firefox the obviously better mobile browser, Chrome seems like a pretty strong case of defaults' power. Tho gotta add the "Google Search Fixer" select addon because they sure doesn't want you to get summary cards, financial charts and other goodies if you use a competitor browser.

Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and co without the ads circus. Duolingo without daily activity limit for some reason.

I've only run into one site (Instagram) that forces the use of the app, and I just close the site instead.

Another great example lately is Reddit. Reddit's mobile experience had become awful. Every time someone sends me a reddit link and I click on it, I'm taken to Reddit's mobile site, which should function just fine and dandy, but the minute it detects you are there on a mobile browser, it spams you with "Reddit works best in the app!" messages, and won't let you view some subs at all without signing in. Reddit is a great example of mobile done wrong. Don't be like Reddit.

Thankfully there are third party clients for Reddit. Check out Infinity @ F-Droid.

thanks for the recommendation! Love f-droid, will download the infinity app in a bit and give it a spin.

Er no, most iOS apps are not thinly veiled webapps. Have you ever used iOS?

Most apps are moving to React Native especially if they're targeting Android and iOS, but that's still a far cry from being a wrapper around a webapp.

I think this is only true for small biz.

All the big names quietly or publicly abandoned their efforts to fully migrate to React Native, focusing only on the most simple use-cases/views if they do keep it around. Even with the smartest people working on it, it's tough to keep React Native performant.

Sorry I didn't express that clearly FWIW, didn't mean that literally.

It's just that most apps people use are pretty much the same as their respective websites. All of FAAMG's websites work as perfectly fine replacement to the apps, even better, IMHO, when you get rid of the ads apparatus.

And they'll still see a ton of YouTube ads.

Not unless they pay for YouTube Premium (or share it with someone else paying for it). It's well worth it, IMHO.

I finally got fed up with ads on youtube and decided to put my money where my mouth is vis-a-vis supporting business models that I want to succeed (paying for content instead of with my eyeballs).

I have a little-used gmail account that I registered a few years ago, as my original gmail became completely overrun with spam and I switched to Fastmail.

I added a credit card to the account and tried to pay for Youtube Premium and was immediately flagged for suspicious activity. To reactivate my account, Google wants me to verify my identity with photos of goverment ID and a full KYC-style form.

No thanks. I signed up for https://nebula.app/ instead - they were able to process my payment on the first attempt.

Chances are they saw the login as fraud given it went unused via years and the first thing that login did was sign up for YT Premium via a credit card.

A potential problem they're trying to prevent might be where money launderers use google accounts to funnel YT Premium money to specific channels via watch time (since Premium pays out a lot more, and pay per minute watched[0]).

0: https://youtu.be/Rh5hL47z2us?t=100

I'm sure they have the best intentions but there's literally no way to appeal it. Why can't they verify the credit card the way every other merchant seems to be able to?

Sounds like there is a way to appeal it. You just have to provide a copy of a photo id.

Fair enough I should have said there is no reasonable way to appeal it.

There are a couple of ways to block YT ads, but DNS-based adblockers won't do it.

On Android you can simply install an alternate YT client, boom, job's done. Works on Android TV also.

On iOS, the content blocker lists in Safari can block YT ads, but there's no way to block them in Google's YouTube app unless you jailbreak and install a modified app. So just watch YT in Safari.

You can side load YouTube tweaked apps. You’ll have to refresh the app every 7 days without a workaround or dev account but altserver makes it painless after the first time.

yewtu.be / Invidious for the win!