I’m not sure it’s the “best” way, but it’s a solid alternative, and receives rapid updates when YouTube moves to break things.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/15571129
I’m using this all the time myself. There is no login to YouTube required and it supports adding subscriptions and doing everything important you can do on YouTube.
And the best part is no ads whatsoever.
It’s annoying though that you can’t save videos to lists or subscribe to channels without logging in to youtube account.
Newpipe or Clipious also work on AndroidTV
I use NewPipe on regular Android but read somewhere it wasn’t recommended to be used on Android TV because it wasn’t designed for it. If you vouch for it working fine then maybe I’ll try it.
Just make a dummy account for only that if you don’t want to mix yours into YT
It’s using the YouTube API, so that makes sense. The developer likely wants to keep the app focused and reduce the amount of feature creep, hence reusing YouTube’s standard subscription and list systems rather than building their own. That’s also what the majority of users expect - if someone subscribes to a YouTube channel on one device, they’d expect to be subscribed to it on all devices.