I just downloaded and have been loving this. It loads pretty quickly, navigation is intuitive, and I'll finally stop forgetting that Nebula exists because it'll all be in my one big subscription feed.
Since I'm new to moving over to open source, I want to ask the veterans: is this as incredible as it seems right now, or is there something I'm missing?
If you actually watch the OP, he talks about this. They don't want the app to be copied and then have ads and tracking injected and then slapped onto the Play Store to exploit users like NewPipe has right now.
The issue here isn't open source, its that google forbids newpipe to be in the play store, so there is a artificial market gap created by googles policies. These clones exist because google takes time to remove apps, such as newpipe clones.
The cloners are exploiting bureaucratic inefficiency, and they are providing a service the play store users, making forbidden software available to them, even if temporarily.
The real solution should be to get the app stores to be neutral, but thats not a fight any of us can win, I realize.