Not a 3rd party front end as such but on android I use YT through browser with DeArrow, Sponsorblock & uBO. I never sign in to YouTube, subscriptions & "watch later" i handle via a specific note set up in Joplin. Also all tracking is removed first via Untracker. Takes an extra few seconds to add video links to Joplin but its become second nature & works well for me & of course this way let's me save links to PeerTube content & any other sources too
this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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Privacy
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Thanks Sounds good but I can't access YouTube without a VPN so I'm gonna get the "login to confirm you're not a bot" error the second I open YT on web
Materialious has DeArrow, but apparently only the desktop and Android clients work. The web client is blocked by YT unfortunately :(
Public Invidious instances are kinda Dead at the moment
I love dearrow, it's an invaluable tool. I wish grayjay (https://grayjay.app/) will support it in the future.
Edit: there is a fork the YouTube source with dearrow support, but not official. https://github.com/netux/grayjay-source-youtube
I have literally tried all of the YouTube Frontends I can find and grayjay is the most reliable of them all in my opinion but their YT plugin doesn't support DeArrow. It seems like Louis Rossman doesn't like these tools as he repeatedly said on his channel He's not a fan of neither the SponsorBlock and nor DeArrow and understandably so after all he is a content creator himself. I wish instead of making a bunch of useless yt frontends someone would fork their plugin but I understand maintaining it would be hard work with YouTube constantly changing things in background and subsequent upstream updates need to be merged so who am I to judge I guess
Yeah I became aware of their stance on SponsorBlock while enabling it in Grayjay. TBH, if they are still giving me a choice, I don't mind what their stance is on this. I (and this is my super personal opinion) much prefer to consciously donate than being served ads or passively contributing to the youtube sponsor hustle.
Yeah who cares as long as they have it. But that's why I think they probably don't have any plans to add DeArrow to their official YT plugin
The fork doesn't look like it's being maintained unfortunately.
wow just what I was looking for and it's abandoned
Ah true, stupid me I didn't even look at the repo history or commits. Thanks for pointing it out :)
Yeah I wish it was official! Love DeArrow and grayjay!
Freetube
Yeah I have tried freetube android recently. It looked very alpha stage to me and lacking but promising
Nothing about it seems alpa to me, but it's down quite often because youtube is fighting against it. I use pipepipe as a backup.
I meant their android port I use their desktop app that's great
Funny how the desktop app doesn't work for me either
Yeah sometimes it doesn't work for me too but I think that's because I use a VPN
It says here that LibreTube works, and I just checked and can confirm. In its settings, choose SponsorBlock -> Enable DeArrow.
Yeah I know I tried this one recently too but with recent YouTube restrictions It doesn't work for me anymore
yeah, nowadays i think they changed their focus from watching directly from YouTube or piped to being a client for personal instances, quite a shame...
did you try to change instance in settings?
There were some preset piped instances in it I tried some of them. I have to mention that I use a VPN to access YouTube and maybe that is my problem but I have to use a VPN since YouTube access is restricted where I live
The Dev is implementing a local only mode for the next version. It can be downloaded from the Nightly-Builds Repo if you want to try it.
This is the link to the nightly-builds: https://github.com/libre-tube/NightlyBuilds
Be aware that it is a Debug-Build so it will be a bit laggy
Thanks but How can it solve "confirm you're not a bot" error without a logged in cookies?
I use LibreTube and I can confirm that with settings "Disable Piped proxy" and "Local stream extraction" enabled it works. Give it a try
Yeah someone else suggested that too I installed it again and to my surprise it works for now but I'm sure I tried the local extraction the last time too anyways thanks gonna test it for a few days with multiple VPN servers to see if it really passes Edit: it still doesn't work with some VPN servers "confirm you're not a bot" error
But I suppose it's not what you're looking for if you want ans it's only for android smart TVs.
Yeah it's the best YouTube Frontend for Android TV for sure
I'm not 100% sure about DeArrow, but ReVanced definitely still works, and it does support Ajay's Sponsorblock, so I suspect DeArrow would also be supported.
Yeah I have been using yt ReVanced for years and you're right it supports both dearrow and sponsorblock but recently I have gotten rid of all Google apps on my phone except yt ReVanced and microg and I'm looking to finish the job
I did the same... ditched all google services, except maps and revanced. They're just unbeatable right now in terms of user experience
Yeah I agree. I'd love to get rid of maps, but location history is just way too valuable to give up, and I couldn't find anybody else who does it.
I also really like navigation that's responsive to current traffic levels. Obviously even if someone else provided that, them having fewer users would mean it's not going to be very effective, but I'd be willing to switch to someone else who at least was attempting to do that, even if their userbase wasn't there yet.
Right now though...nobody that I could find even tries to do either of those crucial features.
I'm not following your logic here. Why would you want to get rid of ReVanced? It's not a Google product any more than other alternative frontends, right?
Because It's modded official YT app with probably a lot of telemetry and phoning home in background
I guess I just assumed they'd remove the telemetry, but yeah, shouldn't assume.
Could you list the replacements you use? I am especially wondering about Google maps.
Try both Magic Earth and Organic Maps but none of them work flawlessly like Google Maps and you have to either give up on it or make concessions
organic maps is great, also magic earth