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Comment by Steltek | Hacker News Reader

Every time I see an alt-client for Youtube, I feel like this is quickly becoming the BitTorrent vs. Legit DVD/BD game all over again. Here's the thing: I pay for Youtube Premium. Aside from web pages, I'd say it's the biggest non-interactive medium that I consume. And that said, the official Android client SUUUUUCCCKKKSS.

I don't care about blocking ads or downloads. I've already legitimately paid for those features. But I want screen rotation to not suck. I want comments to be easier to read. I want notifications and subscriptions to not be laundered by your shitty recommendation engine. And who the hell thought the Watch Later playlist should pop up/over when I try to play a video?! No one wants that.

I don't mind paying for what I use but I feel like a real sucker when I get a shittier experience compared to pirates.

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I'm surprised to hear that the Android YouTube experience sucks, I've long believed Google were deliberately making the iOS YouTube experience as awful as possible as some kind of lure to Android. The gripes list for iOS, browser or app, would well exceed the character count for a HN comment.

All the apps, including the “TV device” (Roku, Apple TV) apps seem to be kept fairly in sync. This wasn’t always the case but as of a few years ago, seems to hold true.

Good list. My biggest gripe is still that I cannot queue things on a mobile device. It seems like such a big omission.

I’ve always used “watch later” as a queue- it’s very easy to add videos to it while scrolling, then navigate to it and click “play all”.

Why can't we read comments on other platforms like Roku? Always I see a video on my TV and then wonder what the comments are, so have to find the video on my phone or computer.

I spent a decent chunk of time paying for Youtube Premium (Red at the time) and eventually I stopped signing in and started using NewPipe on my phone instead, even though I was still paying. Partially that was for privacy reasons, but the bigger reason is that NewPipe is just an improvement over the official app in just about every single way.

Similar experience to you:

- Downloads weren't reliable. I'm paying money to do this "legitimately", and my offline videos just stop working randomly, I couldn't trust that they'll still be there when I open my phone.

- Battery life. Oh my goodness, battery life.

- Device limits. I ran into scenarios where if I was signed into Youtube on my phone and desktop and I started playing a video, all of the other videos on every other device would stop and I would get a message shaming me about account sharing or something. This is a paid experience that's worse than just using stock Youtube without paying anyone. Stock Youtube doesn't have any device limits.

- Notifications, recommendation engines, blegh... I can turn off comments in NewPipe. I can turn off recommended videos entirely.

- Patchy control over data usage. I never really felt like I could trust the app not to start downloading things over a mobile connection no matter what settings I checked.

- Ads in the app for Youtube Red, the thing that I was already paying for. This kind of made me mad, I was paying to show support for a non-advertising model, and Google instead kept bugging me about exclusive Youtube Red content.

- No good queuing system without making lists (this may have changed, I think the Youtube website supports queues at this point, so maybe the app does now as well).

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Eventually I stopped paying for Youtube Red because I didn't see what the point was and I couldn't figure out what I was accomplishing. I wanted to signal to Youtube that I was willing to pay for a better experience, but they weren't getting that message and I didn't seem to be communicating what I wanted to communicate. And since I wasn't using the official client at that point, none of my subscriptions were going to the channels I wanted to support, so I did the math and found out that direct donations were a much more economical/impactful way for me to support them. I was just donating money to Google for no reason.

I'm willing to pay for services like Youtube if they were willing to put in even the bare minimum of effort on this stuff. But what am I paying for? The old Youtube Red app was worse than using Youtube in a browser, and considerably worse than front-ends like NewPipe. I don't think I'm being greedy or unreasonable asking Youtube for a button that lets me turn off video recommendations.

Maybe the service has gotten better now, I haven't checked. But it doesn't sound like it has. The entire Youtube experience feels needlessly adversarial. It's not about piracy[0], it's not about consuming content for free. I spent a decent chunk of time quite literally giving Google money for nothing; giving them money even though I wasn't using their app. I am willing to pay for the infrastructure and hosting that Youtube provides.

I just want a good experience, and there's still no option for me to pay Google for a good Youtube experience. And giving them money doesn't seem to be incentivizing them to fix any of it. It's really just embarrassing that a 3rd-party project using an unofficial API is so much better than every native client that Youtube is offering.

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[0]: Although to be clear, I do not believe that using NewPipe is actually piracy under any legal definition.

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