Exactly this.

And that launch country list is most likely the countries where cracked YouTube Premium is most common.

App piracy is huge by copying around modded APK's, and everyone's grandma is doing it.

I pay for YouTube Premium and I have an alt app on my phone because the user experience is just better. You're supposed to have background play in the regular YouTube app, but videos regularly pause until you return to the yt app to reload.

It all worked perfectly fine back on my iPod touch, pre-premium bs. Tech is regressing.

I'm on a family plan (cheap) and I use it for the music player for the inevitable question of why I'm doing this.

NewPipe is in no way cracked:

https://newpipe.net/

Google could already flag these apps as malware or whatever. What developer verification does is enable Google to detect polymorphic apps.