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Comment by thrance | Hacker News Reader

Same here, being able to enjoy YouTube without ads is the only thing really blocking me from switching to ios. Silver lining is, maybe if using YouTube is made painful again it'll help me cure my last remaining internet addiction.

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I used to think jailbreaking was the only way to do this, and mourned my adblocker tweaks when Apple made jailbreaking practically impossible. But turns out sideloading on iOS is a pretty easy alternative: just install AltStore via your computer, sign in with your Apple ID, and then import and install the YTLitePlus .ipa from their GitHub[1]. This gets you a YouTube clone with adblocking, SponsorBlock, custom UI controls, and all sorts of other quality-of-life features. You can even sign into and sync with your existing YouTube account.

The only downside is that free Apple accounts must renew their certificate in AltStore (while connected to their computer's home network) once a week, or else it'll all be deactivated and you'll have to reinstall AltStore and YTLitePlus from scratch. But you can pay $99 for a year-long developer account, set a recurring reminder to renew, or worst case YTLitePlus makes it easy to export your settings so you can quickly restore it after reinstalling.

[1] https://github.com/YTLitePlus/YTLitePlus

youtube premium for a year is probably cheaper than an apple developer account though

Orion browser (from Kagi) and Brave block natively youtube adds on iphone.

The YouTube app still feels a bit nicer to use than the web mobile client. And with Revanced you can even play vids in the background + a few nice features like sponsorblock and removing shorts.

You can play background videos with brave too. Listened to a bunch of podcasts at the gym

I watch YouTube without ads on iOS. Any decent Safari ad blocker stops YouTube's ads. Google seems to make YouTube an intentionally subpar experience in a browser compared to a mobile app, but it works.

You can install iOS Safari ad blockers. AdGuard for example

ReVanced is so much more than an adblocker though.

Yes, it blocks ads but it also skips sponsored segments and other chaff with a SponsorBlock integration. Then it fixes all the little UI annoyances across apps, for example letting you filter out low-view videos and live streams from your TikTok feed.

It turns mass market apps into something that an HN user would make for themselves.

I’m all for keeping user freedom to install whatever they want, and wish it was easy to do so on my iPhone. I will point out though that if you pay for YouTube premium it has now incorporated the ability to skip in-video sponsored ads. I use this all the time now on my Apple TV via the YouTube app.

It is actually pretty hypocritical they’re adding such tech to their apps while fighting so hard against people that want to block the ads they serve…

You can get this experience in Android (without sideloading) using Firefox with the correct plugins. I don't have an iPhone so I don't know if the same is true there.

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