• Evilcoleslaw@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    For Android on phones and tablets look up Revanced. You have to download the YouTube .apk from somewhere like apkmirror, then use the Revanced manager to apply patches to block ads and change functionality. Then you log into your account with their own version of MicroG/gmscore. It was briefly affected by the issue in the main post but was working again in a few hours.

    For Android-based smart TVs and streaming devices there’s SmartTube (SmartTubeNext). Not sure how well they’ll do if YouTube goes cat and mouse though.

    And for a wider variety of devices (including Apple TV and now WebOS) there’s also Kodi which has a YouTube addon although logging in with it is kind of a pain as you need to get API keys, etc.

    & finally on a desktop browser uBlock Origin alone handles all the ads pretty well, and you can optionally add Sponsorblock.

    Oh. And check out some of the over the top TV services and see if there are any cheap ones that might meet your needs to replace cable. Though the way the cable companies do their bundling even that might not save you much as the net might jump up to more than $80 standalone.