People degoogling are stuck keeping a Google account purely because YouTube's recommendations are good and nothing private replicates them. Private front-ends (NewPipe, Grayjay, FreeTube, Invidious) faithfully handle playback and subscriptions but offer only reverse-chronological subscription feeds plus a global 'trending' list — no personalized discovery. The opportunity is a recommendation/discovery layer that builds taste locally (on-device, or from a self-hosted feed) instead of profiling you in the cloud, so 'private' stops meaning 'worse at finding new things to watch'.
builder note Trying to out-recommend YouTube globally is the venture-scale trap. The winnable indie version is a local, on-device taste model that re-ranks content surfaced by existing front-ends (NewPipe/Grayjay) using your own watch history — turning 'private' into the feature rather than the downgrade.
landscape (3 existing solutions)
Privacy YouTube front-ends solved playback and subscriptions but treat recommendations as out of scope. The hard, unbuilt part is generating good 'what next' suggestions without server-side profiling — which is exactly the one thing keeping privacy-minded users tethered to a Google account.
Grayjay Its subscription feed is a reverse-chronological list of videos from creators you already follow; there is no personalized recommendation or discovery of new content you don't already subscribe to. NewPipe / FreeTube / Invidious Offer search, subscriptions and a global trending/popular feed, but no taste-based recommendations — and the whole point of staying logged-out is that you give up the personalized 'home' feed entirely. YouTube (signed in) Best-in-class recommendations, but requires a Google account and full watch-history profiling — precisely what these users are trying to leave, which is why they keep an account 'just for recommendations'. sources (1)
youtuberecommendationsprivacydegooglediscovery
Multilingual power users who relied on Fleksy (pulled from the app stores around 2024 and now crashing) want a keyboard where you scrub through and accept or delete word suggestions with up/down swipes after typing, where the spacebar both moves the cursor and switches languages without hiding the suggestion bar, and where word-delete is an accelerating swipe — all in a borderless, minimalist UI. Gboard, HeliBoard, FlorisBoard and FUTO each deliver pieces but none the whole combination. The asker says it doesn't have to be FOSS if it's private, polished and reputable.
builder note The non-obvious win isn't yet another swipe keyboard — it's making correction visible and gestural (scrub suggestions, save or delete a word with up/down) while keeping the spacebar doing double duty for cursor and language. FUTO already proves users will adopt a paid-philosophy keyboard here; match its language handling and beat it specifically on post-typing correction UX.
landscape (4 existing solutions)
Fleksy set a power-user bar — visible correction scrubbing plus a multi-function spacebar — that the FOSS successors are converging on but none has fully matched. The unmet need is the specific combination, not any single feature, which is why a heavy Fleksy user who has tried five keyboards still has no home.
FUTO Keyboard Closest and actively improving — now shows 3 post-swipe alternatives and supports spacebar language switching — but per FUTO's own docs, disabling spacebar-language-switch hides the suggestion bar, so you can't cleanly have both spacebar cursor movement and language switching, and post-typing correction scrubbing is still limited. HeliBoard Applies autocorrection blindly without surfacing selectable options alongside the toolbar; swipe-delete is limited to the backspace key; spacebar can't simultaneously handle cursor movement and language switching. FlorisBoard Word-correction system still immature/non-functional for this user; no cursor-movement gestures; theming is CSS-based and too complex to configure. Gboard No visible, gestural post-input correction control; minimal theming; clunky text selection; closed-source and tied to Google. sources (1)
keyboardandroidfossaccessibilitypower-users