[rodalpho]

The addon is being hotfixed, but that's very different from someone taking ownership as the active maintainer.

Google only makes YouTube apps for huge market share-- android and iOS. FireTV and even Roku were forced to use their HTML5 app. They want Kodi to do the same thing. I use that HTML5 app on my FireTV right now, it actually works great, but it obviously isn't integrated with the Kodi UI and library. And of course it plays ads (until you block them).

The YouTube APIv3 sucks, and searches use so much quota, not due to Google's incompetence but because they really don't want anyone to use it for a third-party youtube app. They want other apps to link to and embed YouTube content freely, but they don't want us to replace their app or HTML5 website.

One of the major enhancements Boxee made to XBMC back in the day was integrating a webkit browser, so users could watch shows on all the various individual websites that proliferated at the time. I know someone at Team Kodi has been working on something similar for several years now, but for whatever reason it wasn't pushed to completion. That's not a great answer-- it means abandoning the Kodi UI, custom-mapping input to Kodi to the webpage, and no doubt a host of other annoying problems-- but it may be the only way to get YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix working smoothly long-term.