Uhg. Got railroaded into updating the Android YouTube app (old one finally refused to run with a nag modal) and the new one is so bad. Main "feed" is all "social media" junk - text and image posts by channels - and hardly any real videos.
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NewPipe mostly works well and gives you background playback without paying for it but you need something else as a fallback for when the API changes. Best to get it from NewPipe directly rather than F-Droid since it ends up being necessary to get the updates ASAP.
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I used to use it but yeah, it kept becoming unusable due to missing updates on F-Droid.
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It has a self-updater if you get a release directly from GitHub and they're quite good at updating it quickly. Still ends up being unusable for a few days when YouTube API changes but it usually doesn't take long.
Android does standard key pinning / verification itself anyways.
And by API I just means when they change the site's internal API since NewPipe doesn't use the actual API with substantial limitations. It doesn't really break that often though. A couple times a year, and then they fix it in a couple days.
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