Google warns users of these apps that their experience may deteriorate soon. They may “experience buffering issues” or see errors such as “the following content is not available on this app” when trying to watch videos.
Similar to Google Search, ads have become insufferable for many users of the service. There are too many of them, they may break the viewing experience, and they may show inappropriate content.
YouTube Premium is expensive. What weights more for some users is that its functionality is severely limited when compared to third-party apps.
The cat and mouse game continues.
For those looking to avoid ads or improve privacy, here are some options for free, open source, privacy-friendly frontends to YouTube without advertisements:
Revanced and UBlock Origin still working for me on Android and Firefox respectively. As the new Chrome update launches and every Chromium based browser follows suit, I do wonder if Google will just straight up block Firefox in the near future. Eventually, I think Google will win this by breaking YouTube on everything except their own apps. Unfortunately, YouTube is kind of the only ubiquitous platform that could pull a disastrous move like that and remain on top.
Such a waste. They should be putting their effort into making a better product.
Like piracy, I view ad blocking as a service issue. Users don’t block ads because they’re trying to cut your revenue stream. Users block ads because they suck. If your ads don’t suck so bad like if there was some effort put towards filtering out malware and scams, perhaps not so many people would feel the need to block.
Do you want to users to pay for premium? Make it something worth having! Make it the best and easiest service available.
Google has the choice to be the better man, but instead he chooses to throw punches at
its own customers. It’s an understandable choice but a great waste of resources and a wasted opportunity.Hopefully ublock, piped, invidious and newpipe can keep successfully working. Not had a problem with them so far
