I’m using this all the time myself. There is no login to YouTube required and it supports adding subscriptions and doing everything important you can do on YouTube.
And the best part is no ads whatsoever.
Youtube/google/alphabet are almost certainly aware it exists already. The only real risk is too many people switching to it.
But even then there isn’t much they can do to stop it’s use. They can’t tighten up or remove their api, but then page scraping will take over. They can obfuscation their page, but that will not work forever.
It’s a cat and mouse game that is impossible to win for them.
You know the same thing was said with Beeper’s imessage on Android pytorch success. “Apple won’t be able to change this. They’d have to change the very nature of imessage itself to block this!” And then, two days later it was blocked completely so, as much as I would hope Google couldn’t block FreeTube, don’t expect such huge successes without tempering expectation.
I can’t say I’m familiar with that particular event. But I’m guessing there is a difference there in that iMessage is well, a messaging service. YouTube isn’t, their videos are on public webpages.
All Freetube and company needs to do, if it comes to it, is find a way extract a video from a public webpage. There’s a million ways to do that.
iMessage is not a public webpage, and so there is no real way around it unless you go through their api.
