I've heard of enough people wanting ads too. And people complaining that they want them back after they were blocked.

It gets harder and harder to have any faith in humanity these days.

Yep. It's becoming more and more common for folks to know that they can do it, but it certainly isn't ubiquitous. It wasn't that long ago when I caught my partner listening to music on YouTube with all the ads and I blew their mind away by installing NewPipe. They just had no idea.

I use YouTube in Firefox for Android because it has ublock. That's by far the easiest way. All the other apps wouldn't work for me or don't show my recommendations.

I seem to have a visceral reaction to advertisements. It's very physical.

I only listen to public radio stations in my country, because they only run adds every hour.

Use f-droid. The apps may not always be as polished (hell, some play store apps look like they came out of 2005), but you can filter apps by anti-features such as ads, tracking, permissions, etc.

As for what you've mentioned:

The fossify repo of apps is privacy friendly, no ads, etc.

Fossify Voice Recorder (Record anything with this Open-source and Ad-free recorder) https://f-droid.org/packages/org.fossify.voicerecorder/

Uh, may I introduce you to F-droid, the FOSS "appstore".

Edit: adding a link and also the community:

https://f-droid.org/

!fdroid@lemmy.ml

Fortunately, you can block all those ads on Android. Check out Tracker Control: https://f-droid.org/packages/net.kollnig.missioncontrol.fdroid

I hadn't heard of FreeTube, thanks for the recommendation.

I hope I'm not jinxing myself, but I don't ever mess with my Ublock Origin settings and I've never once had it break or gotten the threatening messages about adblockers on YT. I'm not sure why, but I'm not going to change anything while I've got a good thing going.

Just a shot in the dark here, but do you have ambient mode enabled? (that annoying glow light around the video). I've read from various people that it can use an insane amount of cpu on some devices. Disabling it fixed the performance issues they faced.

On desktop I really like FreeTube, if you're interested in an alternative. I don't usually want apps for things that should be websites, but I use YouTube enough (and Google invests so much energy in making youtube.com a miserable experience) that it justifies having a dedicated app for it, in my case.

At every step they get someone to pay for less than what they promise: advertisers pay for more than their effective reach, consumers get more ads than what they pay to remove, content creators get paid a fraction of less than what they generate.