side loaders stay winning. once they disable that, i go to graphene and say shit like graphene users stay winning.

my personal tactic / benchmark for dealing with enshittification is to imagine the nuclear option (completely degoogled life) for a given platform (mobile shit). and each time they do something shitty, i invest the time and effort to move another step towards it. just like i used to have a shitty job, and every day the bosses did something i hated, i would update the resume and throw it around. like a productive way to blow off steam. then one day, i got an offer that was killer and fuckin' bounced.

honestly, the whole reason i have a killer jellyfin/servarr setup + home theater was years of asshole decisions by studios and streaming companies until i finally had enough, tested out my new setup, then seamlessly transitioned to something easier and more enjoyable as i cancelled all my subscriptions.

i have been using newpipe for so long that when somebody shows me some shit with the native app, it blows me away. all the fuckin' ads and dogshit UX, like holy shit. it's the worst. i will never go back to that.

and, sure, sometimes newpipe falls behind and i can't watch a video right then. i do the mental calculus of deciding if i actually want to watch it enough that i'll watch 4 insurance ads in a row and then one every 5 minutes. half the time i don't, so i just do something else. so it's like the process is training me to resist the call of immediate content and to never normalize their horrendous UX.

ps - love how newpipe has a built in "save" feature to scrape either audio or audio+video. i just started using this to build a little library of latest hits on my phone for short trips. it + AIMP for playback and i've got an easy setup for quickly scraping an mp3 or two right into my music folder. i would have killed for this kind of easy setup years ago.

Is it possible to even install NewPipe without side loading?

pretty sure it's just a 24 hour wait and then u can download whatever u want after pressing a button

Google keeps removing/breaking advanced search features.

It also doesn't help that any alternative clients or ad blockers, Google keeps shitting them up.

Go to F Droid = "Due to Google policies this app will no longer function." Go to vanced = "We're shutting down, you can guess the reason why, we don't have to tell you." Go get a adblocker = "You have 3 videos and then you just can't use YouTube. Also we're going to do the equivalent of cranking down the AC until you leave by slowing down your browser artificially."

Man that sucks, fuck the education system

You have stuff like "DNS66" on Android and "DNSCloak" on iOS, both of which allow you to do DNS based adblocking, even when using cellular networking.

It's very nice. Doesn't block all the ads, but it gets rid of a great majority of them!

Especially in mobile phone games.

Does revanced not work for that?

If that ever stops working for you and need help defeating that particular limitation let me know because I know a couple of ways around it that can help