I think they are clamping down and trying to force people to watch yt in Google's desired way. They have managed to stop most Piped instances via ip banning and also requesting users to "sign in to confirm you are not a robot". I wish their was a proper alternative at this point. It would be great if something like Peertube took off.
Might be cool to start advocating for some YouTube creators to also post their stuff on federated video hosting/sharing instances. Peertube is pretty cool. I mean shit, if any of you are thinking of being creators, and you make a video, put it both on YouTube and some Peertube instance.
Edit: replaced a word with "instance" and added word "instance"
I use SmartTube on my TV and NewPipe on my phone. Except for links from Lemmy.
If this bullshit is/becomes a thing for every YouTube video, I'm gonna have to do a lot of annoying copying and pasting or just eschew pretty much all videos on Lemmy 🤬
1000 for SmartTube!!
I finally side-loaded uYou for my iphone and last time I used my android tablet I was able to update reVanced but thats been forever ago.
I finally managed to do that too, so there's that 🖕 to Google. And then the specific video hit me with the dreaded "not available in your country" bullshit 🤦
Not necessary, apps can register to open links from specific domains.
The only caveat is that if they don't also own the domain - like Google owns both youtube.com and the YouTube Android app - you have to manually go to the settings for the app in System Settings and enable them, under 'Open by default'.
There is a similar thing already written, minus the automatic part. You set it as your default browser and lets you do all sorts of things to the link before opening it in a browser. It lets you choose which app to use the link in afterwards. You can unshort urls, it checks for malware or redirects... You get the picture. Not sure if this helps with what you are after:
UntrackMe, does't open an app, but redirects to a chosen Invidious instance. I use farside.link/invidious which chooses a random instance closer to you.
Alternatively, just use the share link on any function, and route it to the appropriate app. In this case, share a Youtube Link to the official app or to NewPipe.