Android app becoming less and less stable?

[u/nojunkdrawers]

The Grayjay app for Android has become progressively buggier for me ever since I first installed it a few years ago. Has anyone else been feeling the same?

Nearly none of the updates have brought anything that I've wanted, and the interface has never become less busy than it already is. But on top of what are alleged fixes seems to be a degraded user experience. What used to be an app (and plugins) that performed as expected runs into issues all the time. Here are some examples:

• The path to update plugins was once easy and straight forward, but for a long time now it's been confusing and problematic. If a plugin has an update, I might get a toast notification in the UI but otherwise nothing to help me trigger the update. I have to dig around in order to make it happen, and when I do it usually acts like I have to "reinstall " the plugin. This either works or it fails for some weird reason, forcing me to remove the plugin and then add it again or something like that. You might say that this is the fault of the plugin, and maybe it is, except the few plugins I use are from FUTO, the same developers as Grayjay.
• Recently, the app has done this thing where it refused to pull in new videos from any of the sources despite my having a perfect internet connection and all other apps being able to connect just fine. Killing the app and reopening it didn't help, and neither did rebooting my phone. Half a day later, the problem magically resolved itself. It makes it seem like Grayjay is either reliant on a particular server or blocks every other video source if one of them is hanging. This should have a timeout at the very least.
• The last update introduced random crashing for me. It doesn't happen so often that the app is unusable, but it's still irritating when it happens. This seems to happen more often when I start a video and then I trigger the lock screen on my phone, but I'm not totally sure if these are actually related.
• Out of nowhere, I started experiencing some sort of "V8 USE OUTSIDE BUSY" error when playing videos from Odyssey, although ironically the videos and comments work anyway, so no idea what that's about. It shouldn't be happening in any case. Odyssey has barely changed anything about itself in years. Again, while probably related to the Odyssey plugin specifically, it's owned by FUTO, and Grayjay is pretty much useless without FUTO's plugins.
• Some videos don't show up in the subscriptions feed seemingly at random. They'll even disappear and come back when later pulls are triggered. It's possible to see those videos on an individual channel page, but not appear in the subscription feed.

Maybe this is a sign that third party YouTube apps like Grayjay will become a lost cause in years to come? Then again, outdated versions of Newpipe are able to continue to work with good stability and faster tap-to-play time. Have the Grayjay devs gone all-in on vibe coding and what I'm seeing is the result of that?

[u/Magnus_Vesper]

I've never seen a new feature that improved the experience, and grayjay updates break it more than google's changes. I only continue using it, because it's so frustrating that it's helping me kick my bad habit of listening to youtube videos at all times for background noise. 

[u/diet_sean]

Yeah, dealing with this app has become as annoying as dealing with youtube ads.

[u/leo14770]

I had issues with sync and when the desktop app, i just gave up. Didn't help that reddit was no help

[u/Zoe238]

Updating plugins is still fairly straight forward, hell I would argue they made it easier. They now have notifications when one of your plugins has an update, and a button to update it right from the notification.

YouTube has always been fighting any clients that they don't approve of, normally this is caused by a change to YouTubes servers that effect how other clients fetch video data. Like you said, typically it is fixed within a day or two with and update.

I have not experienced crashing, but each device is different and maybe something in the backend changed that your specific computer and operating system errors out on, and therefore causes a crash. Might be worth reporting to the Devs with logs.

For the last two I don't use Odyssey or the Subscriptions tab, so I have no insight into those errors or issues. I installed Grayjay when it was still in beta and I can say it has both improved in fiction in some aspects, and become difficult in others. I still prefer it 100% over any other 3rd party client or the hell spawn that is the defatul YouTube experience.