I’m using a stock Samsung Galaxy 8 phone right now (with Android 10) and I disabled the YouTube app. I was basically sick of its s***. Since then, I never sign in to the app/site, and so may aspects of using the site are much better now.
- Everything is faster, since they don’t know me / aren’t tracking as much.
- I always open YT in Firefox Focus, which doesn’t ever keep cookies or history each time I close it, so there’s no history for YT to mine each time I visit again.
- I’m pretty sure I see fewer ads since I don’t have a deep history for YT to mine / target.
- More random suggestions from YT means I am mostly broken out of the bubble caused by their tracking. I find new, interesting music, for instance, now, from the suggestions.
- Hitting “back” in the browser means I go back wherever I was before, not to the YT home page (like the app used to do to me)
I still visit the site often, and appreciate all the good music and channels I watch, but now it’s overall a much more positive experience, more like YT was a few years ago versus the horrible mess it’s become recently.
I’d still appreciate any other tips anyone has for making YT visits even more enjoyable.
Install Newpipe and you get an even better YouTube experience. Can be a Holy Shit experience for people who never knew YouTube before it became shit.
There’s also YouTube revanced as well
Literally would not visit youtube otherwise, as proven by the brief pause after Vanced stopped working.
Another app is LibreTube, although it uses piped, which I kinda dislike as it means (depending on the instance you connect to) videos load slower and the subscriptions don’t all get refreshed.
I know there is a toggle for disabling piped, but the subscription issue doesn’t seem to get affected.
There’s a fork of NewPipe with sponsor block. I’d highly recommended getting that.
The equivalent on your PC would be an app called freetube
Its a bit out of date currently sadly
Works perfectly fine for me. I use it daily, including right now. Give it a shot. Some people are put off by not having personalised suggestions or being able to login to sync or the different interface…but for me all of those are strengths of the app, not weaknesses.
Sponsor block is also available as a browser plugin on desktop
I installed new pipe to my 15 year old son and he loves it! He hates the algorithm
What I came here to say, my favourite app on my phone.
Is newpipe on any playstore or do I need to go find the apk myself? I assume the latter, lol
Install f-droid, It’s a reliable alternate software store for Android and it’s been around for a very long time.
Thanks for the advice!
It’s on f droid