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:
I’d say more: don’t use Youtube if you don’t like it.
It’s very hypocritical to see how everyone bashes at Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Uber, etc. and yet they continue using it as if life would be hell without the luxury of those completelly non essential brands. If you truly don’t like them, just let them die… look for alternatives. Supporting an alternative is what’s gonna hurt them the most if what you actually want is to force them to change.
There’s also a lot of videos from rich Youtube creators complaining about Youtube policies, and yet most of them don’t even try to set up channels on alternative platforms. Many creators have enough resources to even launch their own private video podcast services, and yet only very few do anything close to even attempt that.