I’m looking for an app to browse YouTube using multiple accounts. It has to be convenient to switch between multiple accounts, and keep them separate. I’ve struggled to find a YT client that does this well, most of them seem to advertise “Use YouTube without an account”. I’d look on the app store but frankly the play store sketches me the fuck out, even though google has a “moderation system” (we all know how well they keep malware off the platform)
Newpipe is the best client on Fdroid, but I don’t know if you can use multiple (or even any) account with it
Newpipe has groups that you could use to separate subscribed chanels by account. No logging in though, by design.
LibreTube also has this.
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Does libretube allow/integrate YT accounts? The whole point is so that I can post comments/interact with streams without risking correlation attacks.
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What you’re searching doesn’t exist and will never exist.
You want to comment/interact with multiple accounts, and that can be done exclusively with the official app and the official website.
The reason is that if someone reverse engineers and spoofs a way to comment from a foss app, 30 seconds after the first release, some spambot asshole would immediately edit the code to send spam, and Google would patch that way immediately
Most open-source clients will by default have the option to block ads, which goes directly against the TOS and will be a quick way to get their API access shut down. This is why most open-source clients will avoid using the API in the first place, since they’ll get shut down. This means that connecting to a YouTube account is not an option.
Not really anything like this out there, Grayjay might work but I’ve never tried it. You could have two different ones, like NewPiped and Libretube, maybe?
Newpipe for Videos Innertune for Youtube Music - highly recommend this.
https://smarttubeapp.github.io/ On my Android TV.
Personally, I really enjoy LibreTube (Website, F-Droid link, GitHub). It is great for privacy as it proxies all traffic to YouTube through a Piped instance meaning you don’t have to connect to YouTube servers and your identity won’t be exposed to Google.
NewPipe (Website, F-Droid link, GitHub) is another good option, but it makes direct requests to YouTube. There are also forks of NewPipe like NewPipe x SponsorBlock (IzzyOnDroid link) which just adds a SponsorBlock integration and there is BraveNewPipe which has support for more video streaming plattforms.
Clipious (F-Droid, GitHub) is a pretty new app that uses the Invidious API to privately pull content from YouTube. I haven’t tried it out though.
Unfortunately I haven’t been impressed with the TRULY open source options. There are two KINDA open source options that I would personally say are much better:
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ReVanced is sorta open source, but it’s basically a tool to modify the YouTube app, which is not open source.
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GrayJay is source available, not truly FOSS. But it’s an excellent app and has been stable in my experience (especially impressive as it’s only a few months old).
I second this, grayjay.app is great. It does break TOS but you don’t have to login to the app, you can just add your subscriptions over and boom. It’s not FOSS but it’s not really too much of a problem since it’s supported by an organisation focused on decentralizing the big tech (FUTO) so I think it’s pretty safe to support using the app.
Their license is temporary as well right? I won’t keep my hopes up much, but they do state it will be changed, don’t know why nor when
Well they want to keep the code under FUTO licensing but maybe we can hope they switch to GPL-3 :)
Agreed, source available licenses really rub me the wrong way, yet FUTO’s software is really good, it’d be a bit of shame if it stayed stuck on that
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LibreTube
Google killed off most YouTube apps some years ago, in favor of YouTube Red. Google stated those apps being in violation of the YouTube ToS, but even when those apps removed the violating features, Google would find new reasons for keeping them off the Play Store. Well, and then they would sell those supposedly ToS-violating features themselves, as part of YouTube Red, like for example background playback.
Since then, most YouTube apps are knowingly in violation of the ToS or at least not holding their breath that Google might decide so.
So, either they don’t use the official YouTube API, like NewPipe and LibreTube, meaning you can’t log in with those. Or they don’t put in too much effort, like ReVanced just being a mod of the official app, so that won’t have the features you want. Or I guess, they just risk it for quick profit, like Grayjay, but that will probably get shut down before they have such features developed.
Theoretically, a non-ToS-violating app can exist and could be distributed via the Play Store, but it would basically not be able to integrate any unique feature.So, yeah, as others said, I don’t think this exists.
You could try some alternative methods like:- Use two different apps, logged into two different YouTube accounts.
- Utilize an Android work profile to be logged into different accounts with different installations of the same app.
- If you just care about having different subscription feeds, use RSS feeds instead.
- See if a non-Google operating system is less shit at this.
What do you mean by the Greyjay comment?
Well, reading that back, the above comment is maybe a bit harsh, because I hardly know anything about Grayjay specifically. They do seem to have a grander vision where they combine all kinds of services, not just YouTube, and maybe they really are hoping that Google won’t ToS them.
But yeah, the way I imagine this will go down, is that Grayjay will grow for a bit, until Google notices losses from this new competitor. Then Grayjay will receive a letter that they’re in violation of the YouTube ToS. Grayjay will try to get that resolved, but no one at Google responds. Eventually they’ll be forced to take out the YouTube integration, making the app significantly less useful, which is its death sentence.
I don’t quite understand how their monetization model works, so I don’t know who will lose money here, but I imagine someone will.
Ultimately, they’re building a business reliant on Google, which has never been a good idea.
I’m assuming because they aren’t foss check their license) and clearly intent to have a business around the app. On the website it says they make money by selling licenses but I didn’t do enough research to know how that works.
