[thiht]

SmartTube is amazing for many, MANY reasons. The first obvious one is that it blocks ads AND embeds SponsorBlock by default. The second is that ads aside, it has a better UI and UX than the official YouTube app. One single unpaid guy does a better work than Google at making a TV app. The third is that SmartTube comes with tons of useful features:

- remote control to be able to cast on SmartTube, directly from the official YouTube app

- there’s a plugin to use a crowdsourced version of thumbnails

- you can hide Shorts

- and basically everything is configurable

Just install SmartTube, even if you’re a YouTube Premium user it’s worth it.

[freefaler]

The "single guy" does better than google is because of incentives. Not that google is unable to do the same thing. The biggest ad company won't make the same choices as a dev who wants to use the product for its benefits.

We'll see more and more algo-feed enshitification. I'm not ruling out "you don't need a subscription feed anymore, we'll show you our best AI-chosen videos.

It was a good long run, I hope "product managers" won't destroy YT like Facebook did with "a place to keep up with frends" to "a shitty feed infested with ads".

[izacus]

In other words - SmartTube developer doesn't have to earn revenue for YouTube with their app. Everything else comes from there.

[ilrwbwrkhv]

I mean anybody can do anything so the talk here is about what one person can do and is actually doing rather than the potential of what they can do.

Google I don't know if it has the potential or not but it doesn't seem to do anything to build good products it never has whatever successes it ever had.

It also creates very buggy apps. For example, even now Gmail and YouTube is buggy on common paths. For example, try deleting your spam emails and you will see the spam number on the sidebar will not clear unless you refresh. YouTube comments on the YouTube Android app often doesn't load or it loads for the wrong video etc.

So historically, Google has always been bad with actual product development. So it's not really a stretch to say that one person can do better than Google.

[freefaler]

Google Search in 2010 was a great product.

They have the ability but not the incentives to make great products now. It's the bane of all big companies, design by committee and MBA trained managers.

All big high-performance companies had the owner/founder in charge to fight the bureaucracy and conformity.