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Comment by nightfly | Hacker News Reader

What problems do you have with the official app? I normally have large list of complaints about video streaming services, and I don't have a single issue with the Android Youtube app

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Some videos have end cards which are super annoying and impossible to disable. Youtube Stories are stuffed in your face whether you like it or not because Youtube is competing with TikTok. Youtube doesn't think you understand numbers, so for video quality you can only choose Low Medium and High. There is no way to copy a video at a particular timestamp.

These are all solved by Vanced. Paying for Youtube premium does not solve any of these.

Those cards appear when pausing the video as well. You may be doing that to read something off the screen, only to be blocked by that nuisance.

There's a trick to hide them. You know that gesture you do when watching a video vertically to minimize the video to get back to the video feed? While you're doing the gesture, the end cards are hidden. Just hold the gesture, and you can hide the cards.

Yes, that sounds totally reasonable and not at all user hostile.

My big issue is the backgrounding. I like watching a video while cooking, but I also need to use timers. Not having the video stop and re-orient itself to portrait while I quickly set or dismiss a timer is excellent. I also find the UI during live streams to be borderline unusable on mobile.

This is my primary use case for Newpipe. There is another workaround by using desktop mode in Firefox Android.

If you run Firefox nightly, it's possible to enable additional extensions, including background video fix.

Good news is Video Background Play Fix is among the (admittedly few) extension that are enabled in Firefox for Android [0]. No need to use the nightly version.

How badly Mozilla messed up with Firefox on Android is worth another topic, however.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/it/android/addon/video-background...

> My big issue is the backgrounding. I like watching a video while cooking, but I also need to use timers. Not having the video stop and re-orient itself to portrait while I quickly set or dismiss a timer is excellent.

Background playback is a paid feature. You may disagree with that decision but the option is there if you wanted it.

you cannot select a default video resolution - they either are in high quality, 1080p or higher, or pithy 360p, and every video you play resets it back to whatever the default. Same with the video speed - you cannot set a video speed, every time you play a video the speed resets back to 1x.

All of those above are possible via the website - it remembers your video's quality and speed preferences.

There are too many youtube stories shoved right in your face with the app - no way to disable it.

There is no way to disable the 'cast' button from the player - it's not very useful but you can easily fat finger it.

That's just the surface - i haven't even gotten to the ads, and the forced community posts etc.

Forced ads on mobile is just an experience I'd rather not deal with. If I didn't have them blocked on my main machine I could at least tab out and do something else in the meantime. Via mobile you can't really do that and it was enough to make me think twice about even bothering to use the official app before I got Vanced.

Add to those list of cons that I've been years hopelessly trying to educate YouTube to avoid showing me repeated videos or topics that don't interest me, but they don't care, as long as it increases "engagement", they will do as they please, not as you would.

Ads. Vanced removes ads

Ads

No background play

Mainly

Those are paid features. You may disagree with the pricing but I'm not sure if those are valid complaints when you're actual issue seems to be that you don't want to pay for these features (which is, of course, legitimate).

Okay. Good point.

I can modify my behaviour instead. Watch using computers with Adblock and de program myself to want to listen to music from YouTube.

Boom done, no need for a YouTube subscription. Subscription hell has got to end.

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