Cool! I think you meant Newpipe? Probably autocorrect. I usually use that one as well, since I don't really watch YT on my phone not having sponsorblock or dearrow doesn't really bother me.

And yea, the proxy/VPN thing is a widespread issue that affects all YT alternatives. The root cause is YT themselves blocking ranges of IPs if they determine it is a data center or VPN (and also random nsig changes). Every once in a while it will start working, but then you'll get blocked after watching one vid.

This same reason is why the amount of public Invidious instances has dwindled and they now recommend self-hosting it. Even with FreeTube, I can't use a VPN. You might still encounter some issues from time to time even with Newpipe through a VPN.

I don't agree with what is written in that blog BTW, 1st I like that there's a repo that at least tries as best as it can to protect the free software aspect of the apps, which many disregard but are pretty important to me, that's one of the main values from f-droid for me. Proprietary binary components can include many invasive "features" one is not aware of. As requirement the source code and building from it is required. If you build from source, removing proprietary dependencies for example you'll get a different binary, and that requires a new signature on the final package. F-droid has improved a lot on reproducible builds. And I've read in several places magnifying the issue of apks from official f-droid being moths later compared to original developer release, my own experience is different, and when I've written, I immediately get a reaction from someone which doesn't agree with me (I never reply back). I've read about the single entity signature, but that alone should not be an issue, otherwise we would be distrusting packages from debian, arch, and so on, which use a set of signatures to sign all of their packages, particularly when the build and signing process is automated, in some distros most packages come signed by the same bot. The issue about using a VM with a LTS distro about to expire or already expired is a valid one, but can you blame them when migrating breaks their flows and they don't have enough hands, and that got overcome any ways. Now a days things are working fine AFAIK. That the clients support multiple repos violate an android policy, oh well, I don't care much about android policies, and google for that matter, which collects a ton of data from users and people forgets about what that means, but what a bad practice not to follow those policies.

I believe some people really dislike free software, which is not the same as open source, one really need to value the four basic freedoms it procures, and if one doesn't give a dumb for whatever reason then one doesn't really appreciate free software, perhaps all one wants is not paid software, which is not the same. Free has two meanings and people often gets confused, and f-droid is about free software. It's true they can't guarantee every single bit of their content, but they trying through their policies and a few scripts has value to me, and taking a look at what free software meaning and the basic freedoms it looks to preserve is important to be understood before complaining about an organization trying to offer free software. It would be more appropriate if the terminology changes to use the spanish "libre" word instead, but it is what it is, that why sometimes FOSS is instead referred as FLOS (free/libre or free and libre). And true, as a result developers who want to provide apks through f-droid and also through non free software app stores or repos (whatever makes more sense) need to have in place something to account for the differences, and that's not optimal, but there's a good reason for it, but some developers just don't want to do it and even less not depending on android proprietary stuff or other proprietary stuff for that matter, which is their prerogative any ways.

A little rant of mine, not we all have to agree over the same arguments I guess.

I see, I've never looked super deep into F-Droid or released anything there, I didn't realize that a requirement for releasing on F-Droid was that they build it. Just read their inclusion criteria, interesting.

ETA: Read through the whole article, and godamn. I don't really trust anything Android any way, but this is actually a pretty damn big WTF from F-Droid. Thanks for sharing!