If the App Store method fails, you can manually install an IPA file using sideloading tools.

October 2024 Reading Time: 5 minutes

Distributing decrypted IPAs violates the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). Downloading one for personal use sits in a grey area. You cannot sue Google if they ban your account. From a moral standpoint, you are circumventing their paywall (background playback), which is against their ToS.

The Internet Archive maintains a library of legitimate, decrypted IPAs dumped by users. Search for "YouTube version [x.x.x].ipa". Because these are unmodified stock IPAs, they contain no malware—though they also contain all of Google’s standard ads.