PeerTube crowdfunding to develop mobile app

Happy for them to be developing an app (which already appears to exist), but at ~20‰ with 16 days left... wouldn't it be "better" to collaborate with existing apps like Pipepipe / Newpipe and direct those funds into the platform instead?

First of all there are subgoals with the first one being at 15k which is almost completed. Second of all a real peertube app is mandatory for its success, like they said 80% of people watching videos are from their phone. This app wont be a second way to watch peertube, for most it will be their entry into this ecosystem so it better be good.
I wouldn't want to associate with an app that's ripping off YouTube when you're an app trying to make a better YouTube.
But also, this is open source. Who are you to say that funding an effort should go to one place and not another? I think the people who actually put effort into Peertube are best place to determine what's good for the project.
- its video sharing, its not a crazy concept, like dailymotion and vimeo have existed forever, idk if they still do lol, think social media platforms adding vidoe like facebook killed those as popular alternatives but Im prob wrong

Isn't there already a mobile app?

Developers can focus on whatever they seem appropriate.

But I think content discover and community (lack of) are the biggest issues of peertube right now.

I hop once in a while to the main peertube site and I can never find anything remotely interesting to watch. There may be some good content, but it's impossible to find.

I'd really like to get into the app but its been hard to navigate. Do you have any recommendations for good channels?
- What are your interests?
  Anyway you could try following this community: https://lemmy.world/c/peertube
Federation still is a bit broken

I like that they are finally raising some money to do development. This is really good to see.

But it's never going anywhere even less then lemmy. Video is expensive both in storage and bandwidth compared to text.
- I think they need to find a way to distribute the heavy video parts among volunteers. I think it would be more practical to have it distributed.

GrayJay has a peertube plugin which works well.

but grayjay is only for media consumption. you cannot stream nor upload videos from it
- You're right, I didn't even think of that
Greyjay isn't foss
- It's free, and I see an official Github repository containing the code, is that not foss?

Why not a PWA?

Because PWAs are terrible unfortunately.
- They don't have to be, as far as I understand it. I've installed a few websites as apps on my phone (because their app had trackers in it) and they can work really well. Examples are Bluesky and Flipboard.
  An example where I agree with you is LinkedIn - installed as a web app due to trackers - but they know this, and the whole point of their app is to get you with Facebook and Microsoft trackers, so they make the web app experience miserable on purpose.
  But (and correct me if I'm wrong) a PWA made by a non-surveillance capitalist could be just as good as a native app.
- Pwas aren't terrible. Chrome made pwas terrible.
- There are tons of apps that you use that are just well packaged PWAs, packaged as an app store app, and you don't even know about it.
  PWAs only suck on when they suck, just like everything else.
Don't want to log in again and again every time I clear my browser's cookies!
- Valid. Except on some browsers e.g. Vivaldi you can put sites on a list that retain their cookies even when you clear the rest.
- That’s…literally the point of clearing cookies? Do you also complain that swimming makes you wet?
Well even a PWA still has to be developed and maintained.

Cool!