I am one of those suckers (:sigh) who paid for Youtube since it bundled Youtube Music with it. However, today I used the latter’s Revanced version and it was so much customizable. Right from removing menu items to the stupid cast button Google has forced on us; it seems a billion dollar company can’t compete with these folks who make their apps so much more serviceable.
I don’t wish to go too much into the official Youtube client which too is tacked with things like Remix button and what not.
I find this to be the case to absolutely every app, free versions being filled with adds, selling your data, trying to fry you with more and more dopamine intensive content. And then the paid version, which usually is overpriced, happens to be worse than a modified client of the same app but free.
Youtube for example, doesn’t allow you to download content in 1080, 1440 or 4k, 720 is the limit, for a paid subscription. Then you try revanced and oh wow, you can download 4k content for free, how cool is that?
And usually changing the interface to make it more addictive, forcing shorts on Youtube, reels on Instagram, making the base app worse so people go for the paid version, is why people end up with moddified clients/applications, yet the companies are obviously going to blame us, “pirates oh very bad, they steal content and avoid ads, why would they do such crime”,
Instead of wondering why their app is 4 times heavier than a couple years back, has 8x the useless crap built-in, and is priced 2x than a year ago. At least this crap has taught me to value actual well built apps by great people, in many cases, out of passion.
Props to Freetube, my greatest discovery last year, I can’t even express how much I missed using a useful interface for youtube, instead of what we have now…
Well that’s it, no-one should feel bad for using alternative apps when the actual company is the one to push users out of their apps with shitty updates and anti-consumer practices.
Downloading on Youtube reminds me of the Downloads button on desktop website. Those downloads, upto 1080p atleast at my end, are finicky and since they are playable only in the browser, on the odd occassion , I have found sluggish. I personally think that yt-dlp is much superior with multiple config options that Youtube’s own implementation.
Yeah, on pc yt-dlp is absolutely the best option, If I remember right, there’s even a way of downloading the high bitrate versions of videos spoofing iOS or whatever, but maybe this was using a fork of it
And on android, I used to rock youtube mate