If you use Freetube, you haven’t failed to notice that Google is on the war path again and broke it a few days ago. See this bug report.
Please note that it’s been fixed in this PR. If you download the nightly build #5652, it now works like a champ.
Thanks team Freetube!
Google clearly has the ability to break any and all third party client at any time.
My theory is that they’re conducting random campaigns of working-but-not-all-the-time on this or that client at different times to grind everybody down and force them to comply through shear exhaustion. Because if they banned all 3rd party client outright, it would negatively impact the antitrust case against them.
People who use alternative clients are just using add blockers on the main cite anyway so i don’t see why YouTube should even try to stop them.
Because alternative clients offer features that only the for-pay official client offers, like subscriptions and playlists, and Google can’t collect data on what people subscribe to or their playlists because in alternative clients, they’re stored locally.
Google doesn’t hate third-party clients because they skip ads: it hates them because they impede surveillance and privacy invasion, which is the true bread and butter of Google.