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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

If you use closed platforms tightly controlled by large companies, it's not surprising that things like this will happen.

Meanwhile, on my desktop I use a downloader script that continues to work flawlessly for some of those usecases described in the article; it doesn't use the "official API", but mimics what a browser would do, so YouTube would have to stop working in the browser to stop that from working.

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Yet on Google's own platform, NewPipe, OGYoutube, SkyTube, etc all exist mainly because 3rd party installations on Android rely solely on an "allow installations from non-Market sources" checkbox.

Quite worrisome that they've simply given up because people have so little control over their own devices on Apple's platform now.

That's because the amount of control Google has over Android is far less than Apple and iOS, and it's been said many times, for better or worse, that the policing of their own Play Store is still rather lax. But given the way things are going, and Google's own desire to emulate Apple, I only expect things to get worse for freedom on mobile devices in the future.

Android or Google's control of it has nothing to do with this whatsoever. As soon as Google detects a third party YouTube app exceeding its allowed API usage quotas it can shut it down anytime it likes.

It's a bit more subtle than that. Newpipe and youtube-dl don't use the youtube api. They emulate browser behaviour AFAIK. That's probably the biggest reason they haven't received some form of a letter in general. That they won't be allowed on google's own store is actually not that interesting. The fact that newpipe managed to make a more functional app in a lot of ways than the official youtube app (and I don't mean just the RED functionality) without using the youtube API is quite commendable.

Can you put it on GitHub? :)

youtube-dl is the best media download suite I've seen. It worked for any video hosting site I've ever pointed it at, and it even has options to use ffmpeg to recode the video or extract the audio track. In addition, NewPipe also does a similar thing (it's a free software Android app that has much more features than the official app -- such as playing in the background and as an overlaid tile).

The fact that it has a built-in switch for extracting the sound from a video to MP3 has made my library very happy.

You should try also Youtube-dl - amazing piece of kit :)

As I do not include Python in my system images I wrote a very reliable youtube download script that uses only sh, sed and an http client, where http client is fetch, ftp, curl, wget, or some similar program. Currently it is at 1205 characters, or 1205 bytes. No "developer API" needed.

Have you tried youtube-dl? I've found that it works great.

[1] https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

It already is ;-)

(See the sibling comments.)

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