Normally I use NewPipe on android. It’s an alternative YouTube app that can play videos in the background, doesn’t have ads and allows me to download videos and music.
I had the YouTube app disabled with adb on this phone for all the time I’ve had it. For backup there’s always the browser YouTube page.
I must have done something wrong and accidentally clicked install on the YouTube app again, so it activated and was back to normal on this phone.
Holy hell is that app a terrible advertising machine. Every time I click on a YouTube video now I get sent straight to it and it always plays ads and also has text ads all over the GUI so I can’t even read the channel info etc while I wait for the ads to go away.
I don’t know how people deal with that it would completely make me want to stop using YouTube.
Please do yourself a favor and install NewPipe or ReVanced (I think that’s the name of basically the same app but with sponsorblock additionally). Both are on f-droid.org app store as well. Less important because you can manually use NewPipe but you could also disable the YT app with adb so it disappears from your phone.
on IOS I’ve found the mobile web page to be legitimately better than the app, I can do Picture in Picture and listen to it in the background, things the app won’t let you do without paying. For a while it also let me get rid of the shorts shelf, which the app just had no option for, they got rid of that a few months back, but I’ve found that if I mark “not interested” on any shorts it puts up it hides it again for a while.
Also if the ads are getting a bit much I can open it in fire fox focus and I’ve found it block ads completely, I’ve heard from others that Firefox focus doesn’t block YouTube ads for them, but, I’ve never seen a YouTube ad while using it.
Honestly, in general, if something has a web page, I won’t use an app at this point. I’ve had so many experiences with dedicated apps just being worse experiences.