YouTube

The New YouTube App for Apple TV Is a Disaster

February 20, 2018 · 16:11

I have been using the new Apple TV YouTube app for these past few days and, to be frank… I absolutely hate it. YouTube, with one fell swoop, broke:

  • the ability to touch the edges of remote’s trackpad to skip 15 seconds in either direction;
  • the sounds which accompany navigating the UI via the trackpad;
  • the possibility to scroll the timeline in a very precise fashion, with visible thumbnails;
  • the ability to touch the trackpad to bring up the timeline.

This app is so badly designed and breaks the tvOS UX paradigm to such an extent, that I will not use it until it is fixed. Everything about it is so tragically bad — it’s basically a copy of their web player — that I’m utterly surprised Apple review let it through. At this point, I would prefer to not have the app at all than to imagine people using (and getting used to) this garbage.

Users Report Battery Drain With YouTube App on iOS 11 →

November 13, 2017 · 22:20

Benjamin Mayo:

There are many reports to the YouTube customer support account on Twitter complaining about battery drain when running the app on iOS 11. The company is apparently ‘actively working to fix this’.

The YouTube app appears to have some bugs on iOS 11, affecting all iPhones and iPads, causing the devices to run very warm when watching videos.

This is happening on my iPad Pro 10.5”, but it doesn’t get warm at all — the battery drain is through the roof though. Using YouTube through Safari solves this problem though.

Using iOS 9’s Universal Links (And My YouTube Rant) →

March 30, 2016 · 12:14

Ben Collier:

If you don’t know, Universal Links allow a website and iOS app to be linked together so following a link opens up the app (with the right content) instead of the website. For example, following a link to a Vine video can open up straight in the Vine app; where the video looping experience is much better than the website.

Universal Links are great and I love them, but there is one app that totally screws this up — YouTube. Perhaps this changed recently, but up to about a month ago, I had to use the YouTube app after clicking any YouTube link to watch a video (embeds were exempt from this) — this completely broke down when using Tweetbot or Twitter, breaking my flow and forcing me to jump between apps. I finally uninstalled the app.

This caused one more huge problem. The YouTube app does not offer every setting and option that their website does, especially in terms of managing my own videos. Normally I would just open the desktop site in Safari, but because of Universal Links, it would switch me over to the app every single time that I tried to do so. Unacceptable.