I've been using Altstore for a while. I just have a Windows VM on my existing Proxmox server running Altserver and never have to worry about it. My primary use-case is a third party YouTube client that integrates ad blocking and SponsorBlock-- it saves me a huge amount of time and frustration when using YouTube.
Why not jailbreak? I want to remain on the latest iOS software, and generally speaking, hardware. Jailbreaking is just not an option for me if I want to stay up to date and I don't want to deal with tethered jailbreaks, which seem to be more common for the latest release versions.
You can get sponsor and ad free YouTube through the App Store.
I prefer to avoid sideloading modified versions of the official iOS apps. That feels unsafe to run untrusted code, and I personally don’t want to review the code myself or build from source if that’s even possible.
There is no need to fuss with all of that, when there are plenty of good options on the AppStore.
Yatte [1] is a third party client built from scratch in swift ui. It can connect either Piped or Invidous servers. It’s available on all Apple platforms included tvOS. It runs way better than the official YouTube app.
Safari Extensions - I prefer watching YouTube in the browser. These extensions are universal AppStore purchases and work just as well on mobile as they do on desktop Safari.
Vinegar [2] is a Safari extension that blocks YouTube ads and replaces the player with the default WebKit html player. It makes using YouTube in the browser so much more tolerable. It’s helpful to have when you want to watch videos in 4K - something most Invidious or Piped servers struggle with.
SponsorBlock [3] also has an official Safari extension available.
How well do these apps work with livestreams? That's been YT's secret sauce for me personally. While their player isn't perfect, the way that YT handles livestreams is far and away its most valuable feature. No other platform will allow you to pause a stream, walk away for 2 hours, and come back and let you press play where you left off. On mobile and desktop, it works great. I've had more issues with the YT player on Apple TV but I don't tend to pause streams with that device.
Vinegar has no issues with livestreams. I haven't tested Yattee, but it is being actively developed. Please report any bugs on the github page https://github.com/yattee/yattee
Yeah you can blame Apple for that one. It's straight up non-viable to put up F/OSS apps into the app store. On a basic level, the GPL is incompatible with their codesigning processes and they have no intent of changing that (VLC ran into this wall several times until they managed to work around it).
Putting that one aside (GPL is hardly the only license on the OSS field after all), the App Store model is just plainly too prohibitively expensive to publish a FOSS app for unless you're planning to maximize value. It costs 100 USD every year to just keep an app published (they charge this via their dev license). With F/OSS, budgets often are almost non-existent, so those operational expenses aren't made since they're not justifiable from a hobbyist, donation-funded perspective.
This is also why the platform has so many money-sucking timewasting "games" to be clear. Apple created a perverse incentive to basically ruin the App Store with stuff that extracts as much money as possible, then started selling people a separate subscription service to actually get games people do want to use.[0]
By contrast, the Google Play Store (Androids closest equivalent, albeit slightly different since Android has a far more open model[1]) is just a single 25 USD fee to prove you're a real human and after that there's no financial barriers.
[0]: Thats what Apple Arcade is.
[1]: The one difference between the Play Store and a third party apk installer is that the Play Store gets to ignore the installation request popup. This can be circumvented with root and apparently Google is changing this process to make it uniform when the Digital Markets Act goes into effect.
Oh really? SponsorBlock is without a doubt one of the more popular OSS applications out there, yet the Patreon of its creator barely breaks the 200$ mark[0], which isn't even enough to sustain server costs for just the WebExtension version (source: same Patreon linked before). People just don't donate to FOSS, corporations do[1] and no corporation wants to fund something like SponsorBlock since it's existence is arguably anti-corporate (I'm not the ideologue for that spiel though, sorry to burst that bubble).
The 100$ yearly publishing fee just straight up is a wall that prevents the OSS iOS ecosystem from thriving. It's just high enough that it's hard to justify putting an App out there unless you want to make a profit from it.
$100/year might be nothing for a business, but not a hobbyist.
They had to dual license the iOS version of VLC to get it on the App Store:
> VLC for iOS is bi-licensed under the Mozilla Public License Version 2 as well as the GNU General Public License Version 2 or later. You can modify or redistribute its sources under the conditions of these licenses. Note that additional terms apply for trademarks owned by the VideoLAN association.
> While Ajay may have written sponsorblock, the database it uses is crowdsourced. Charging money for access feels wrong to me.
From the comments in the AppStore:
> Developer Response ,
> Appreciate the concern, but yes it is me uploading it here on my own will. I needed to pay the 100$/year apple fee and buy a mac to compile the extension
Seems only fair to me. Publishing on the AppStore has costs.
Thanks, I had no idea Vinegar existed. The default embedded Youtube player is awful and had me using other browsers to avoid it, none of which I find very good. You’ve made Safari on my iPad usable again.
> it saves me a huge amount of time and frustration when using YouTube.
It doesn't have "sponsor block" but it seems like a lot less of a hassle would be to use YouTube Premium. One of the few subscriptions I think are worth the money.
I’m tempted by YouTube Premium, but at £12/month in the UK it seems so expensive. Thats around double what I pay for Apple TV+, Amazon Prime, or Spotify!
I also don’t really want to use ad blockers with YouTube, because I do want to support the small content creators I watch. But the volume of ads (and especially the unskippable ones!) is getting out of control at times, particularly in the app.
If they brought out a “YouTube Premium lite” or whatever at £6 a month I’d be in.
Does YouTube premium also include ad free YouTube music like it does in the USA? I don't subscribe to a music service like Spotify because my YouTube premium subscription covers both.
Sometimes a friend (you doesn't subscribe to YouTube premium) will show me a YouTube video on their device. I find it impossible to watch YouTube without a subscription. I don't understand how the average user can tolerate the amount of ads.
I'm sort of happy that average joe shmoe can tolerate using youtube with the ads, because if everyone couldn't tolerate them as much as I can't tolerate them, then youtube would not exist.
Even if you pay for youtube you get the sponsor spiels within the videos.
I wouldn't use youtube at all without sponsorblock.
I just don't like the algorithmic sorting that YT Premium does for me. I keep losing the stuff I want to watch, and it keeps ramming crap in front of me.
I tried the free month, and ran screaming. No way.
I have no problems at all, paying for streaming (I pay for quite a few channels). I just didn't like the YT Premium user experience. I suspect, if I was a lot younger, I might like it more.
It's not available in the US either. The latest list I can find says it's being tested in Belgium, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden, and Luxembourg.
When doing those vpn tricks to get lower pricing you run the risk of services terminating your account and that's something a lot of people can't afford when it comes to their google accounts
The YouTube Premium part paid out to creators (by proportional watchtime) is surprisingly high at 55%, especially if you consider that they use remainder to also pay for music licensing.
I think PiP still doesn’t work in the app for me and sponsors aren’t blocked. I get less value from Premium than just SponsorBlock + YouTube PiP. I just have to deal with 720p videos though
I love YouTube premium but the most frustrating thing is that there is no guest mode. You can go incognito but then there are ads. Which means my recommendations get messed up whenever people visit and play things on the TV!
Yep, this is exactly what I'm doing and what the "Switch Account" feature uses. It should maybe be called "Switch Profile" as they are kinda tied together.
Doesn't the "Switch Account" feature do exactly that? If I use it I have the "default" YouTube recommendations that are not based on my main account but it still says YouTube Premium on the top and there's no ads.
YouTube Premium is unreliable when you're traveling. I traveled to Turkey (which is in the list of Premium-compatible countries[1]) and ad-blocking stopped working with a notification (so it wasn't an accident/glitch).
FWIW, I've seen YT premium features geo-revert themselves while traveling, but ad display never reenables itself as far as I can tell.
Downloading new videos is the one feature which usually goes away, though I remember embeds getting squirrelly too, but that may just be vanilla YouTube.
You you ++ has sponsor block and feels most polished and feature rich(though it's just built on official client) even compared to revanced or official YouTube app.
I use them both.
I have the same reservations around jailbreaking. My only requirement was the ability to disable YouTube Shorts (I find it excessively addictive), which you can't do in the official app.
SponsorBlock, ad blocking and playing videos in background were happy surprises that have significantly improved my YouTube experience.
I haven't had any major issue with AltStore. As long as I have the Mail/AltStore server app running on my Mac, it tends to just work. If I forgot to open Mail or AltStore after a restart, the apps stop working and I need to reinstall AltStore from my Mac, but it takes under 2 minutes and might happen a handful of times per year. That's less than the the time I'd waste on YT Shorts in a day.
Why not jailbreak? I want to remain on the latest iOS software, and generally speaking, hardware. Jailbreaking is just not an option for me if I want to stay up to date and I don't want to deal with tethered jailbreaks, which seem to be more common for the latest release versions.