youtube on modern phones sucks

ruabmbua@lemmy.world to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 170 points –

Not even speaking about all the ads in the default YouTube app without a subscription.

The app is basically useless in my opinion. It defaults to freaking 240p for every video. My phone is definitively not the problem, also not the Internet connection. Watching in Firefox on the same connection gives me normal expected quality.

This was better on some "feature phones" without touchscreen!!! YouTube app works and playback is in 720p / 1080p

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One word, Revanced.

Several words: mobile Firefox, ad block, disable youtube app, disable known links to youtube.

Several more words:

Obtuse, rubber goose, green moose, guava juice Giant snake, birthday cake, large fries, chocolate shake!

Thank you.

It's always so refreshing to see someone do the thing you were expecting would happen!

I'm wondering how to get "shiny teeth and me" into a comment somewhere...

And what would be the benefit over Revanced?

Nothing, I this person I know of just had FF and adblock set up already for other reasons, so all I they had to do was stop the youtube app hijacking its own links.

No sponsor block in ff though?

It works with the addon enabled, just like desktop firefox. But right now it's a bitch to manually install addons on the android version, so it's a lot of work. I just use newpipe-sponserblock. Or also LibreTube is also nice while also having sponserblock built in.

how do you install addons on firefox android? I use iceraven now.

To install desktop add-ons you need to use nightly and create an add-on collection to sync. But sponsor block might have a mobile version that you can install from the settings section of the normal app.

No need for side loading apps. So works on all phones. Phones that are remotely admin have this feature off.

Firefox can't load plugins on iPhones anyway. If you're on Android, and it's a personal device, ReVanced is a better experience.

I searched for Revanced and the top 3 results were malware, with the 4th being the real website lol. Thank God for uBlock saving my ass.

Yes, always search it on github and tell people to find it on github if you can't provide a link for them.

They should really just host their own fdroid repo with binaries of pre-patched apps at their default enabled patches.

They do not distribute any binaries to avoid copyright issues I believe. There are some telegram channels doing what you described, but I wouldn't trust it enough to use it.

OBS was victim to this a while back. it was almost indistinguishable from the real sites so pretty dangerous

Mostly a windows issue there though, Linux and OSX have app stores to install that. Revanced is able to, and just doesn't for some reason. It's a massive security issue for many reasons, and this is a prime example of it. Especially given the app needs a ton of access on your device to operate. It's mind-blowing to me that people recommend this at all, and why there's no repo for it.

Revanced can't exist as a standalone app to be installed like from a store. Google would nuke it. It has to be a patcher. Original Vanced was a standalone app and that is what allowed Google to nuke it from orbit. It's arguable that Google ignored Vanced until the developers got money grubby and tried making NFTs, but the method they used for takedown was DMCA since it was their app just modified.

This is the same thing as ROM hacks, randomizers, etc and why they include a place to upload your own copy of the ROM rather than providing their own. Reverse engineering and modifying are legal, distributing copyright source, binaries, or blobs without the rightsholder permissions is not.

They also do have a repo for it, as well as the offshoot apps like Revanced manager, other app patches, etc. The fact it's not at the top of Google results is a Google-and-SEO problem, not a Revanced problem.

If you want a one and done app install then something like Newpipe is what you want, which is built completely on its own. Revanced is explicitly not that, it's the stock app hacked up. IMHO, Revanced is a nicer experience, but they are two very different experiences and approaches.