In my experience the people crafting these are getting out of hand. When I see these wall to wall in a storefront it makes me wonder what happened to a good old lager.
As for what these were, they are modified versions of the official YouTube app. What has been taken down is the full modified app files (.ipa) ready to install on an iPhone, not the source code to the tweaks that are in the repos.
These modifications do things like replicate the paid YouTube Premium features, from the uYou features list for example:
Ad-Free Browsing: Bid farewell to interruptions and enjoy seamless video playback without annoying advertisements.
Background Playback: Keep your favorite videos running in the background while you multitask or lock your device.
Video and Audio Downloads: Download videos, shorts, and audio tracks in various formats, including MP4 and WebM, for offline viewing and listening pleasure.
[...]
You can see why Google would want to have them taken down. They aren't even a re-implementation with their own code/UI like NewPipe.
So why are people in this thread glad google is doing this?
I thought Lemmy was all pirates and anti monopolies, dont we all have adblock? And background playback used to be default. It was explicitly removed to exploit.
I am not trying to argue but can someone explain why there rooting for the power addicted mega company?
IPAs are the iOS equivalent of APKs. As long as you don't sideload over 3 apps (which is actually 2 if you want to avoid having to connect your device to your computer every week, and even less if you have apps that do things other than being apps), you can sideload IPAs.
Google made GitHub take down all the downloads but not the repositories themselves.