Comment by ssbash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ssbash | Hacker News Reader

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You can get sponsor and ad free YouTube through the App Store.

I prefer to avoid sideloading modified versions of the official iOS apps. That feels unsafe to run untrusted code, and I personally don’t want to review the code myself or build from source if that’s even possible.

There is no need to fuss with all of that, when there are plenty of good options on the AppStore.

Yatte [1] is a third party client built from scratch in swift ui. It can connect either Piped or Invidous servers. It’s available on all Apple platforms included tvOS. It runs way better than the official YouTube app.

Safari Extensions - I prefer watching YouTube in the browser. These extensions are universal AppStore purchases and work just as well on mobile as they do on desktop Safari.

Vinegar [2] is a Safari extension that blocks YouTube ads and replaces the player with the default WebKit html player. It makes using YouTube in the browser so much more tolerable. It’s helpful to have when you want to watch videos in 4K - something most Invidious or Piped servers struggle with.

SponsorBlock [3] also has an official Safari extension available.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yattee/id1595136629

[2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...

[3] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sponsorblock-for-youtube/id157...

How well do these apps work with livestreams? That's been YT's secret sauce for me personally. While their player isn't perfect, the way that YT handles livestreams is far and away its most valuable feature. No other platform will allow you to pause a stream, walk away for 2 hours, and come back and let you press play where you left off. On mobile and desktop, it works great. I've had more issues with the YT player on Apple TV but I don't tend to pause streams with that device.

Vinegar has no issues with livestreams. I haven't tested Yattee, but it is being actively developed. Please report any bugs on the github page https://github.com/yattee/yattee

The latter two require doxxing yourself to Apple to enter their payments ecosystem, or inconvenient gift cards.

Charging money for f/oss simply because sideloading isn't a thing is a scummy move.

While Ajay may have written sponsorblock, the database it uses is crowdsourced. Charging money for access feels wrong to me.

Yeah you can blame Apple for that one. It's straight up non-viable to put up F/OSS apps into the app store. On a basic level, the GPL is incompatible with their codesigning processes and they have no intent of changing that (VLC ran into this wall several times until they managed to work around it).

Putting that one aside (GPL is hardly the only license on the OSS field after all), the App Store model is just plainly too prohibitively expensive to publish a FOSS app for unless you're planning to maximize value. It costs 100 USD every year to just keep an app published (they charge this via their dev license). With F/OSS, budgets often are almost non-existent, so those operational expenses aren't made since they're not justifiable from a hobbyist, donation-funded perspective.

This is also why the platform has so many money-sucking timewasting "games" to be clear. Apple created a perverse incentive to basically ruin the App Store with stuff that extracts as much money as possible, then started selling people a separate subscription service to actually get games people do want to use.[0]

By contrast, the Google Play Store (Androids closest equivalent, albeit slightly different since Android has a far more open model[1]) is just a single 25 USD fee to prove you're a real human and after that there's no financial barriers.

[0]: Thats what Apple Arcade is.

[1]: The one difference between the Play Store and a third party apk installer is that the Play Store gets to ignore the installation request popup. This can be circumvented with root and apparently Google is changing this process to make it uniform when the Digital Markets Act goes into effect.

$100/year is nothing. I'm not sure why that's even being mentioned.

VLC is in the app store (with telemetry, sadly) so I'm not sure where the whole "GPL isn't compatible with the app store" claim comes from.

Oh really? SponsorBlock is without a doubt one of the more popular OSS applications out there, yet the Patreon of its creator barely breaks the 200$ mark[0], which isn't even enough to sustain server costs for just the WebExtension version (source: same Patreon linked before). People just don't donate to FOSS, corporations do[1] and no corporation wants to fund something like SponsorBlock since it's existence is arguably anti-corporate (I'm not the ideologue for that spiel though, sorry to burst that bubble).

The 100$ yearly publishing fee just straight up is a wall that prevents the OSS iOS ecosystem from thriving. It's just high enough that it's hard to justify putting an App out there unless you want to make a profit from it.

[0]: https://patreon.com/ajayyy

[1]: Or rather, most have been shamed into doing it and only pay the bigger projects. Anything smaller just falls to the wayside.

> Oh really? SponsorBlock is without a doubt one of the more popular OSS applications out there

Oh really? I've never heard of it prior to this thread.

$100/year might be nothing for a business, but not a hobbyist.

They had to dual license the iOS version of VLC to get it on the App Store:

> VLC for iOS is bi-licensed under the Mozilla Public License Version 2 as well as the GNU General Public License Version 2 or later. You can modify or redistribute its sources under the conditions of these licenses. Note that additional terms apply for trademarks owned by the VideoLAN association.

> While Ajay may have written sponsorblock, the database it uses is crowdsourced. Charging money for access feels wrong to me.

From the comments in the AppStore:

> Developer Response ,

> Appreciate the concern, but yes it is me uploading it here on my own will. I needed to pay the 100$/year apple fee and buy a mac to compile the extension

Seems only fair to me. Publishing on the AppStore has costs.

> Yatte [1] is a third party client built from scratch in swift ui. It can connect either Piped or Invidous servers.

How though? I just spent the last hour trying to configure a source and it seems impossible to make it work.

Pick a server instance from https://docs.invidious.io/instances/ or https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped/wiki/Instances. Navigate to Settings > Locations > Custom Locations > Add Location. Paste in the server url and you're done.

Thanks, I had no idea Vinegar existed. The default embedded Youtube player is awful and had me using other browsers to avoid it, none of which I find very good. You’ve made Safari on my iPad usable again.

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