Wait, blocking subtitles of all things? TV shows and films often get entangled in copyright issues, which sometimes make them regionally available only, but subtitles! That’s preposterous.

I too ran into an Android Wear watch face that mimicked the Pixel lockscreen. However, it was priced X INR(Indian Rupee) per year in my country and was decently cheap. However, I soon ran into another app, which was a one time purchase, that did what it did mainly(sync and show phone and watch battery on each other) and worked on most lock screens. So the latter was a proper kind of app design amd atleast not subscription hell.

It is not weird paying for certain things. I also pay for certain things, in fact, over time, I have slowly made my mind to pay for things that are one off payments over recurring subscriptions. I am typing this from Boost client which I purchased because I appreciated dev’s work and it wasn’t subscription hell.

Downloading on Youtube reminds me of the Downloads button on desktop website. Those downloads, upto 1080p atleast at my end, are finicky and since they are playable only in the browser, on the odd occassion , I have found sluggish. I personally think that yt-dlp is much superior with multiple config options that Youtube’s own implementation.

Yes, you are right. Google could if they really wanted to. After all, they bought their Gemini thing(the merits and demerits of it might warrant a separate thread of it’s own) when they saw everyone was scrambling in that direction.

I used to be on Newpipe in the old days. I liked it’s simple no frills UI. Ironically, I can still choose my desired video quality(like 720p, since I am on mobile data) but on official Youtube app, I only have/had three options - Low, High and Auto. No way to set an exact video resolution system wide, it could only be done per video. These constraints make almost any third party client superior to the official thing Google is providing.