Normally I use NewPipe on android. It’s an alternative YouTube app that can play videos in the background, doesn’t have ads and allows me to download videos and music.
I had the YouTube app disabled with adb on this phone for all the time I’ve had it. For backup there’s always the browser YouTube page.
I must have done something wrong and accidentally clicked install on the YouTube app again, so it activated and was back to normal on this phone.
Holy hell is that app a terrible advertising machine. Every time I click on a YouTube video now I get sent straight to it and it always plays ads and also has text ads all over the GUI so I can’t even read the channel info etc while I wait for the ads to go away.
I don’t know how people deal with that it would completely make me want to stop using YouTube.
Please do yourself a favor and install NewPipe or ReVanced (I think that’s the name of basically the same app but with sponsorblock additionally). Both are on f-droid.org app store as well. Less important because you can manually use NewPipe but you could also disable the YT app with adb so it disappears from your phone.
Most people here seem to be using Android, but in case there are any iOS users out there, you may be thinking to type: “cries in Apple“.
Fortunately though, there are a few browsers that can still block YT ads. I prefer to use Orion + ublock origin and Brave.
Video Lite is great for iOS.
Thanks. I’ll try that out as well.
There is Yattee for Apple devices, but sadly for some unknown reason they haven’t released an update version on the app store in over a year which means it no longer works.
It used to be good, but it hasn’t worked in a long time. Just realized I still had it on my phone, but I’ve removed it now.
Apparently it’s still getting updated via testflight… if you can get into it.