Unwatched (youtube frontend for iOS)

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Short description

Unwatched is an alternative way of accessing youtube on iOS. It is open source (GPL 3) and ad free. It’s privacy policy is straightforward and seems solid.

The primary focus of the app appears to be less directly related to privacy and more about reducing the clutter, crap, influence of the algo, and addictiveness of Youtube, but it may improve privacy nonetheless.

Like other frontends it allows you to subscribe to channels without a youtube account. RSS is used under the hood.

Why I think this tool should be added

I don’t necessarily think this tool should be added. I’ve only just learned of it’s existence. This post is more of a *request for assessment/critique. I’d like to hear what others think about it.

Why it piques my interest and might be worth adding in the future: There aren’t many options for privacy respecting youtube frontends on iOS. Unwatched, may fill that niche.

I like that it’s open source, that it uses RSS, I like that it is (inadvertently) ad free, and I like the privacy policy. Beyond that I’m not sure how privacy enhancing or privacy preserving it is, but at a bare minimum, it’s better than the official youtube client. And considering the lack of options on iOS, its worth considering this app.

Check it out and share your thoughts.

Section on Privacy Guides

Frontends

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I have been testing Unwatched since this post and I am liking it so far.

Privacy:

  • It can be set to use youtube-nocookie[.]com instead of standard YouTube (off by default).
  • If iCloud sync is turned on, the RSS data is stored in iCloud Drive. With ADP turned on this makes the RSS subscription data E2EE.

Usability

  • Handy shortcuts to open YouTube videos and channels in Unwatched.
  • PiP works well.
  • It remembers your place in videos and will resume from where you left off.
5 Likes
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I have been using Unwatched for a few months together with a VPN and it works perfectly so far.

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Been using this for a while too and it’s great.

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got to say, i’ve been using it for about 2 weeks now, it’s very solid. no cookies enabled with the shortcut to add videos from youtube on brave to the unwatched queue is great. i def recommend for anyone who’s trying to privacy harden on ios to use that

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True, the only ‘app’ one I know is Yattee. Other options are through the webbrowser like invidious

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Why have I not heard of this app? Just installed it on my iPad mini. Enabled the no-cookie setting. Thanks for sharing.

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do you mind sharing how you were able to get invidious instances to work on this app? wasn’t able to do it myself before i found unwatched. i have been using invidious website tho and its good

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I don’t have an iPhone, and I don’t know how to test without one. The reason I know about this app is because I have looked into an iPhone alternative to NewPipe to recommend to friends using https://alternativeto.net.

Tho their FAQ on Github says:

How do I use Locations functionality?
Yattee can connect to the instances of the following apps:

Invidious
Piped
You can simply add your custom location in Settings. It is important to use API URL (not front-end URL) of your instance. Use of this app with public instances is not endorsed.

So you have to get the API URL of Invidious or Piped. Not really sure how that works, but mayhaps some instances let you access that easily or perhaps an F12 “developer view” inspection in firefox to see the API URL?

1 Like