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.
Youtube-webos is the single reason why I’ve resumed watching YT in the livingroom. I had stopped when they introduced the second pre-roll ad and a lot of things became unskippable. Now my old TV is rooted, it doesn’t really phone home, it doesn’t show ads and it’s a breeze. Let’s hope it stays that way, because Google is already trying to fight the adblockers for some time now.
You don’t even need to root it, developer mode is relatively simple to set up and that lets you install whatever. A pihole is good for stopping it phoning home though.
I believe my WebOS version is so old, they stopped any update or data collection servers. I had developer mode running before. That’s perfectly alright. Just a bit annoying to constantly refresh, and somehow my attempts to automate it failed. So one day I rooted it and now I have full ssh access, a homebrew channel… And I would have liked to use that to run an Ambilight, and that requires root. Sadly it requires a newer operating system version so I still don’t have any LEDs in the background.
Now you can install the homebrew channel just with developer mode. There’s also an app to automatically refresh the timer but I was a little hesitant about the access it wanted so I’m just doing it manually for now.