Pro tip. Ublock origin gets you that mostly ad-free experience you were hoping for. Donate the money you save from the YouTube premium sub to ublock origin instead.
uBlock Origin + SponsorBlock is the only way YouTube is even remotely watchable these days. Even still, it's not really worth it. I frequently find it better to spend my time doing anything else.
Oh absolutely - we banned “casual” YouTube use at home 5 years ago and we don’t regret it one bit. Still use it when looking up a concrete video on a specific topic or when a web page directs me to a tutorial or something there, but don’t use it for regular “entertainment” (I’m bored, let’s hit YouTube).
Some people can’t seem to live without YouTube though.
Sure! On Android TV, SmartTubeNext is fantastic. Installation instructions are in the GitHub repo. For Apple TV the best option I have found is MuTube. It's basically a YouTube repack without ads and with SponsorBlock. The catch is that it requires sideloading or an Apple developer account. Sideloadly etc can automatically refresh certificates while on wifi, but I ended up purchasing a dev account because it works for all the Apple devices in my home. Which leads me to the iPhone. There are many YouTube sideloads. I use uYouEnhanced. As above, you can use Sideloadly or sign the app yourself. An LLM or coding harness can walk you through the process (or do it for you). With an Apple dev account, signed apps last for a year, so I don't need to worry about refreshing the certs.
SmartTubeNext automatically updates itself, but the Apple TV and iPhone apps don't. Surprisingly, it has not been an issue. They keep working fine without updates for the year. I just update once a year when I refresh the certs.
