alt Hacker Newsagreeable argument. I am also running towards firefox, but keeping the firefox open, juggling between the tabs, especially the quirks YT poses on Firefox, these apps poses a usecase. Yes, download/subscribe/SB support etc. Currently using libretube mostly.
I'm with you here, it's a degraded user experience running stuff on mobile browser, intentionally so I'd risk saying. Best of both worlds would be to have an android app but it's just a webserver I connect using the browser, you know, like we've always done in linux haha, this way we could have newpipe-like apps targeting the browser running locally.
but for some reason google knows better and there is no efficient way to run local containerized web services.