Windows Phone gets revenge on YouTube from the grave by helping users bypass its ad-blocker-blocker

www.windowscentral.com Windows Phone gets revenge on YouTube from the grave by helping users bypass its ad-blocker-blocker

The Windows Phone user agent bypasses YouTube's annoying anti-ad-blocker pop-up.

Windows Phone gets revenge on YouTube from the grave by helping users bypass its ad-blocker-blocker::Windows Phone to the rescue. A lot of YouTube users want to know how to get around the new annoying YouTube pop-up telling viewers to disable their ad-blocker.

155

155 comments

This article feels like a large language model generated article.

TLDR: use a user agent switcher

Other advice: use Firefox from f Droid, or Mull and install U-Block origin. Use new pipe, or libretube to avoid ads as well
- FreeTube, free open source YT client for desktop (Win, Mac, Linux). Been using it for past few days and despite being alpha, it works quite well. No data sent to YT except video requests. Subscriptions are stored locally and you can create profiles to separate subscriptions.
  
  https://freetubeapp.io/
  
  I love free tube. But I can't quite figure it out. It works great on two of my computers. But on one of my computers is just dog slow. No matter which setting I fiddle with. So it's definitely alpha, if it works for you it's amazing.
  
  I have been using too and it is awesome. Oy thing I have issue with is when playing a Playlist on full-screen it exits full screen at the end of every video so you have to click on it again to go full screen. Quite annoying on how I use it.
  
  Seconding this, FreeTube works quite well.
- Now there's grayjay as well, which is a universal media streaming client that respects your privacy.
  
  Is that android phone only? I mean it would be cool to have it both on desktop and android tv...
- I've been using revanced on android and have got no problems with youtubes enshitiication anthics, it even has sponsorblock for skipping sponsor in videos, it plays in the background in a small window while i browse lemmy. Only set back might be that its a little hard to install, since you need the patcher, a manager called micro g, and a very specific version of youtube that cannot be get from the playstore and the patcing is a little more complex that it should, but its worth every second of it once its done.
- Right?
  
  Every other sentence was something about how Google wouldn't work with Microsoft.
  
  Points were repeated ad nauseum
- I just switched a few days ago from NewPipe to PipePipe. As far as I can tell it functions the same but has more features. I didn't care for LibreTube at all.
- this so much. people are so allergic to firefox for some reason that they are using windows fucking phone.
  
  The article isn't about people using a Windows phone, the article is about people setting their user agent to Windows phone, and then Google not trying to do the ad blocking on them.
I don't know what voodoo magic I've pulled. But I'm still not getting pestered by YouTube to turn off ad block and I'm still watching 5 - 10 videos a day. FF w/ uBlock Origin and piHole
- Probably just A/B testing.
  
  Possibly. Does seem a little long for that being they've been doing this for a couple weeks at least. Maybe I should try it on some of my other devices / computers.
- It isn't rolled out to everybody at once.
  
  I had those warnings and they stopped for me 2 days ago
- Yea I thought I was lucky until a few days ago. Same setup as you; FF, ublock, and pihole. Started with the first message, then this morning I just got the message saying 3 video limit lol.
  
  Thankfully, purging all caches in ublock origin makes it stop for a bit.
  
  And the arms race is on.
- Sadly, I am getting the warning even whitelisting YouTube on Ghostry. I have to turn off Ghostry altogether to do away with the warning.
- FF w/uBlock Origin and + PiHole = No YouTube disable adblocking pestering here also...
- Same here, I have YT watch history turned off and have ads blocked through Brave (I know I know, I’m trying to find a better browser) and haven’t seen anything at all yet, on my pc or phone.
  
  Any particular reason to not use Firefox with addons like ublock? Just curious
And Google updating this old code in 3, 2, 1
- Probably just deleting it 😂
  
  It's a shame, the original windows.phone concept was great
  
  It was great. Even if I didn't like the idea of "yet another walled garden, funded by a company known for its track record against open source software (this was during Ballmer era)", I really liked the design and how fluid the interface was. It could have become another player in the mobile market and lessen the practical duopoly. Firefox OS tried this too, but it also went under.
  
  It was great until people were forced to buy a new phone instead of receiving updates
This is a battle google will lose miserably.
- I doubt it, unfortunately.
  
  Like many other online services they've saturated the market so the only way to increase profits is to extract more money from individual users.
  
  They are also a quasi-monopoly for a reason - hosting and streaming video is resource-intensive, so I wouldn't hold my breath for a free alternative that would scale. AFAIK, piped and such are only frontends to youtube which will be killed off by ToS or through technical means.
  
  Maybe there are free video sites that also host their videos, but as I said, since it quickly becomes very expensive, I don't see anyone being able to do that for free for long.
  
  Unfortunately, if anyone is going to "disrupt" youtube, it is going to come from a silicon valley startup and like youtube they will only burn investor capital for a limited time - until they have saturated the market (or failed). Then they'll have to monetize as well.
  
  My only hope is something like a torrent approach where everyone who streams also hosts. But since that is technically difficult to perfect, needs a huge user base to succeed while not promising any commercial gain for the initiating party, nobody will throw a ton of money at the problem, so I wouldn't hold my breath.
  
  My prediction is that people will either pay for premium or see ads in the mid- to long-term.
  
  We need to think about what people did before YouTube. It was already gaining traction around 2006, but before that you could still watch videos on different websites, it was just decentralized and videos were hosted on smaller pages. You might even see a website dedicated to a single video. YouTube’s incredibly convenient, but internet video can and will survive without it.
  
  Also, lots of the younger generations didn't really mind the ads. After this news showed up, we had a discussion going on my company discord. Most of the older people started sharing workarounds but most of the younger people said that they've been using YouTube with ads and didn't see any problem with it.
  
  I agree that the sheer quantity of resources required to host videos is hard to be able to compete, but there’s also Invidious, which is the fediverse equivalent. As with other fediverse applications, it will largely depend on the people running the instances and how much they storage they can support.
- By what metric will they lose miserably? They do not care about you if you block their shit. This policy will do 3 things:
  
  Make a miniscule amount of people who generate no revenue stop using the platform (basically noone).
  
  Make existing adblockers slightly inconvenienced for a little bit (again, google doesnt actually give a shit)
  
  Make some of the less tech savy people who block ads either whitelist or premium up (this will happen and is the intended outcome).
  
  Google only gains from this.
  
  I've been using YouTube Premium (née YouTube Red) for so long that I totally forgot that there are ads on YouTube and was surprised by all of this news popping off.
- The only reason I still use YouTube is to post to lemmy and download videos so I never have to use their crappy platform
Try grayjay... it's an AWESOME new app, open source, and supports all video networks you can think of as plugins.

It's available on: grayjay.app
- Yes and no. Cool project but I gotta be honest I'm not a big fan of Louis Rossman / FUTO's "open source but not free " stance.
  
  It's open source and it's free. You're free to pay too if you want to support them. Software costs money.
  
  What Louis is protecting against in his license is repurposing the app with malware and ads like was repeatedly done with new pipe. Pick your poison.
  
  2 million people follow that guy so 🤷‍♂️
- Does grayjay update when creators add new videos etc for YouTube? That would be the only reason i DONT use it. Though I don't see whynit wouldnt.
  
  Pulls directly from YouTube or whatever other source you have a plugin for. So yes it'll catch automatically when people release new videos.
- #TeamLouisRossmann and #TeamFUTO represent!
- Is it better than ReVanced?
  
  Try it out and decide for yourself.
I just use NewPipe. Screw Google & YT.
- or LibreTube, it looks more modern imo
  
  Or GrayJay. They have the app on f-droid too. It aggregates almost every video sharing websites. YouTube, twitch, rumble, odysee etc.
- Google will flip the switch on Piped soon I believe.
  
  What relation does newpipe have with piped?
I miss windows phone. The user interface was much cleaner and user friendly than any other phone OS I’ve seen. The only problem was it didn’t have the ecosystem of Android or iOS.
- I'm pretty sure there's a launcher for Android that mimicks the look and feel of the Windows phone
- Same here. I hate the standard rows of icons look on most Android launchers. Since i had to part with my Lumia 950 because off failing app support i have been using Square Home as my launcher on my Samsung S8 and now the Pixel 8.
People could build a sort of mix of youtube and torrent tech, like popcorn or stremio but for short copyright free content. I dont know how to do it.
- …So PeerTube?
  
  No you will still need to host Peertube on your server or VPS etc not even sure why they call it PEERtube because it's clearly not peer to peer. What I'm talking about is a decentralized peer to peer streaming tool like Stremio (uses torrents) but instead of having movies, we could have you know small/average lenght videos like youtube, and also channels and so on.
- You mean removedute but not filled with fascist garbage?
  
  There's the rub, isn't it? Fascists are the ones most actively seeking new platforms to move to after their removal from any other, meaning a lot of the start-up content has to be thoroughly filtered, which takes a lot of effor and resources away from growth.
  
  You mean PeerTube?
This is the best summary I could come up with:

There are a lot of people frustrated by YouTube's decision to force a pop-up message for viewers using an ad-blocker as seen in this Reddit post.

Microsoft itself built an excellent Windows Phone YouTube app for its era, only for it to receive an arbitrary block by Google.

An X (Twitter) user named @endermanch posted a workaround for bypassing the extremely annoying YouTube pop-up that, for now, doesn't force you to disable your ad-blocker but that could just be a matter of time.

At least for right now the method of switching to the Windows Phone user-agent seems to completely remove the YouTube pop-up and allows you to get back to glorious ad-free viewing.

At the moment it's just an inconvenience and users can click out of the pop-up to continue watching their favorite creators such as our Windows Central channel.

However, with the hubris that these content platforms must feel after Netflix was successfully able to stop password sharing and still increase subscriber numbers, I don't think it will take long for YouTube to completely block users that have an ad-blocker enabled.

The original article contains 581 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 69%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
- Good bot
I think I had this phone lol
A lot of YouTube users want to know how to get around the new annoying YouTube pop-up telling viewers to disable their ad-blocker.

Have you tried paying for it?
- It absolutely is not worth £17 a month simply for no ads.
  
  Then stop using it 🤷‍♂️ That's a personal value. I find yt+music for the family for$22 a steal.
  
  The entitlement of you all is crazy.
- No, steal from them as much as possible. Stealing from corporations is morally good.
  
  You are stealing from creators, collateral damage I guess 🤷‍♂️
- Sure, just throw money at the corpos, but please don't act surprised when they suddenly double the premium fee, or when they start sneaking in ads for premium users. That's the problem with corpo greed, it just never ends, and the moment you give in to it, you lose.
- I will never ever pay for youtube and I'll never stop blocking ads. Theres always a way, and if the day comes where ad blockers actually become iniffective then thats it for me, I'll find somewhere else. I'm already a reddit refugee since they blocked 3rd party aps and charge a subscription fee, I can't figure out a workaround yet so I dropped reddit altogether.
- What if I want to pay, but also don't want to be tracked?
  
  So I pay for a YouTube premium account, but I still use an ad blocker and logged out YouTube and a VPN so I'm not tracked.
  
  The problem there is that you're giving more money to Alphabet but not giving your YouTube Premium views to the content creators. I understand not wanting to be tracked, but I feel like this is the worst scenario.
  
  Don't use it.
- Why should I pay some extortionate fee each month on Google's monopoly? Even if I do that they're still hoovering up all the data they can get from me.
  
  U-block Origin on desktop, revanced/newpipe for mobile.
  
  IMO the money is much better spent on directly supporting content creators rather than padding the coffers of a 1.75 trillion dollar anti-competitive, monopolistic, tax-dodging, privacy-destroying company like Google.
  
  Exactly, I whack out almost GBP 20 per month to content creators I like.
  
  Spend the money where it will make a difference!
- Remember when streaming services boasted about ad free viewing, only to then Continue to charge you AND serve ads to you WHILE collecting and selling your personal information? These companies can smd.
- Tell me, how many cups of Pumpkin Spice Latte Chai Frappucino we are not drinking then?
  
  👌

155 comments