[c0balt]

Anytime a breaking API change happens in the API used by YouTubes frontend apps like piped[0] (the YouTube interface for this project) or NewPipe[1] tend to break too. This is mostly due the majority of these players not employing the Google YouTube API but instead accessing and/ or scraping the publicly available routes exposed for/ by the YouTube fronted. (You may also find most of the streaming aspect is similiar/ the same as youtube-dl)

[0]: https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped [1]: https://newpipe.net/

[moron4hire]

Note that the YouTube API does not provide access to the media streams for videos. And while Google does provide a number of black-box-style widgets for embedding in apps or webpages, they are not suitable for all use cases. For example: every VR app that wants to include support for YouTube playback has to use a scraping tool of some kind because none of the embedding options can be rendered in 3D.

EDIT: I'd love to be proven wrong here. But I've dug into the code of several open source VR apps that include YouTube playback and they all end in including youtube-dl or yt-dlp.

[Anunayj]

Though any breaking API changes would also break past versions of youtube's own apps?

[c0balt]

I know from my old devices that the youtube app at some point requires you to update it and doesn't allow old versions. They probably have some kind of deprecation mechanism for the YouTube app.