Sideloading

I am still mentally preparing myself for changing from a Google Pixel 6 Pro to an iPhone later this year (and Apple Watch). YouTube is also doing it’s algorithm thing too, suggesting me videos for how people set up their iPhone home screen and what cool apps people are using. It can read my mind!

Speaking of YouTube… Being able to run Revanced on my Android phone and enjoy ad-free YouTube with free picture in picture support, SponsorBlock and other UI tweaks added, is one of the things that I feel I will miss most if I move back to iPhone. I know jailbreaking is a thing still, but the ease of installing little app tweaks and hacks makes me second guess moving back to iOS.

I did some research and found that “sideloading” apps is also still a thing on iOS, despite the need to maintain the app with the latest version that has an authorised developer certificate.

As a test, I sideloaded an app store type app to my iPad called Scarlet and then an app called uYou+ which is a patched YouTube client. At first, uYou+ crashed as soon as I tried to watch a video, but I saw on Reddit that if you disable the build in SponsorBlock service it works, which it did!

I will use the iPad version of uYou+for a few weeks to see what happens when the app’s certificate expires. Looking on Reddit, there are other options too, more app stores I can sideload and even other ways of watching YouTube I could opt for (via Brave browser for example). I am not an intense YouTube user, but I do watch it for 10-15 minutes here and there each day (mainly on the loo) so it is important to me that I get the ad-free experience still. I am not sure I could go back to watching YouTube with ads any more.