Ad-free YouTube Player, what's happening?

Some years ago, I create an app to listen YouTube videos in pip mode and without ads, but the app become viral now, in 2025, what’s happened ?

The app is built in Kotlin, only for Android (because on IOS, pip mode is already available), and it’s perfectly legal, I respect the term and condition of YouTube API contract, in fact I don’t block ads, but I don’t log in users, so by my app you are a ghost user and you have no ads.

The problem is that I can’t do a full-playback mode because it violates the term and conditions but I added a lock function that blocks the screen from miss clicks and reduces the screen brightness to the minimum possible. Over time I notice the different uses that people make and I add features, such as the timer for those who use my app to fall asleep with a video in the background.

My app had just a limit, number of request that YouTube give me, in fact I have 10k points for day and It is often no longer enough to satisfy the requests of the users. For this reason, if you go on YouTube app, you open the video and you click “share“ you can open the video directly in my app to skip ads.

How did the app go viral?

YouTube, this year, increased a number of ads for non-premium account, so people, and me also, are done! I see a lot of post on Reddit about it and I decided to propose to people to download my app, so a little boom of download arrived.

Where you have users, you get feedback, and if you answer them, you start a community. In fact people write me mails or on Reddit to advise, report bugs or just to compliment, and this is wonderful. I also have a buy me a coffee page to get donations.

I don’t gain from my app, to develop is my passion, so I do this for the community and I love when people use my creations. The app is open-source on GitHub and available on PlayStore.

P.S. RYTM stands for Real-YouTube-Music, but I couldn't use it on PlayStore.