I used to use NewPipe back in the days of yore. Then I got Youtube Premium since it bundled in Youtube Music as well which I used. But the former’s app on mobile is a shit show. Even after paying, you are asked to tip random creators, purchase merchandise[ which are shown as actual ads below videos] and join channels to access exclusive videos for more money. Basically pay money once, and then pay more money for more content.
Okay, one could argue atleast the above goes to a channel’s creators and helps them. How would one say then that the Youtube app still doesn’t have a systemwide option to choose video quality for all videos. New Pipe had that option long ago, but Youtube thinks it’s user base are immature who need to be coddled with only two options like “High” and “Data Saver”.
Despite having a Premium thing, I finally crossed over to a Newpipe fork Tubular [available on F Droid] today simply because the paying experience on Youtube Mobile is so bad. I can’t fathom how bad it would be for free customers using the official app.
While this feed issue is manageable if you Pause Your Watch History and Clear Your Watch History before doing so; it does disable a lot of suggestions.
Unfortunately Google and YouTube do not make these options easy to find and they are quick to nag you about turning them back on; and You Must Refuse This and ignore the errors and whines at every prompt for a while before they leave you alone.
So by it’s very nature NewPipe completely defuses this garbage by simply being a much saner front-end than using the “Native” YouTube apps ever were.
You know I think YouTube might start learning their lesson if more and more people began refusing to use their scummy front-end more than strictly necessary. Unfortunately they’re going to go through the usual stages of grief while doing so and they absolutely are currently trying to attack apps like GrayJay and NewPipe with spurious lawsuits.
So instead; maybe those of you who “Pay” for YouTube Premium should simply cancel your service and start donating that amount to projects like NewPipe, when that is possible. (Yes I know Team NewPipe will not accept donations for legal reasons, but similar projects do exist, like FreeTube or Invidious, that can and do accept donations to cover costs for server hosted things in their developments.)
I wouldn’t be renewing my subscription once it expires. I mainly used YouTube Music from it but Google still hasn’t managed feature parity with either Spotify or with it’s previous incarnation Google Play Music either. I mean, they shoved the cast button that few people use replacing the next button used to skip to other track.
Play Music had a much cleaner interface on both desktop and mobile.
I am still angry at google for killing Play Music. You could upload your own files, back in the day. It was a genuinely awesome and unique product that I used every single day.
You can still upload your own music files (50k is the limit, I think) via web interface.
Huh… so you can. That’s interesting, I did not know that. Thanks.
I just checked Google support site and apparently the limit is 100,000 songs now, which is quite great. The problem is, they don’t tell if and how much, is the music compressed when uploading. Even flac is listed as a supported format but if Google starts storing bit perfect flac without compression, they are gonna give way way more than 15 GB before a power user can hit halfway their song limit.
Functionality is also nonexistent on administrating uploads in YT Music. At least on GPM you could edit basic tags and upload/edit album art. None of that on YTM
Aye; I remember GPM, and before they enshittified it into the ground, it was damn near comparable to Spotify.