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The YouTube app on Apple TV is absolutely atrocious. I can’t believe either Apple or Google think it’s acceptable — it must be one of the most-used apps on tvO

by jw1224 5y ago

The YouTube app on Apple TV is absolutely atrocious. I can’t believe either Apple or Google think it’s acceptable — it must be one of the most-used apps on tvOS, and is easily the worst I’ve ever come across. It seems to be built with Cobalt [1], so it’s basically HTML5, pretending to be a native app. A short list of flaws which have infuriated me for months: • Scrolling is completely broken. Scroll down a playlist, and it stops after 10 or so videos, hangs, then loses your scroll position. • When you start watching a video, the UI is almost completely unresponsive for the first 5 seconds exactly. You can exit the video, but the title/channel/details are totally hidden for exactly 5 seconds, for some bizarre reason. • Navigating the app is like wading through molasses, even on the newest Apple TV 4K. It’s so unbearably slow. • Even if your YouTube account is verified, age-restricted videos refuse to play. You’re told to “switch to your primary account” to watch them, but, I’m already in my primary account! • A few times I’ve left the app open on a paused video. 20 minutes later, with the Apple TV screensaver now running, the video randomly starts playing again. YouTube is my primary source of video content — I can’t remember the last time I watched an actual TV show. Many of my friends say the same thing. Come on YouTube, get it together! [1] https://cobalt.foo/ https://cobalt.foo/ (I hate to be “that guy”, but seriously — if Steve Jobs was still around, he wouldn’t have accepted this. There are stories of him calling Google execs because he didn’t like the colour on one of their buttons. Anyway, I digress…)

Shank 5y ago
I’m so glad you mentioned this. Trying to navigate to a channel from a YouTube video you’re watching is significantly impaired by the fact that the default behavior is to scrub rapidly in the video timeline, and you have to provide a very distinct “break away” gesture to navigate from the scrubber to the channel controls. It’s also extremely difficult to like and dislike videos in the app. You have to break away from the scroll bar, then hit a gear and then navigate to the like/dislike button. I’m glad it’s not just me who hates this.
marcellus23 5y ago
Most frustrating thing for me: in every other app, you hide the scrubber UI just by touching the touchpad. In Youtube, just touching does nothing, you have to press Menu/Back. That's bad enough, because I can't rely on muscle memory to hide the scrubber. I need to remember if I'm in YouTube or not, because if I hit Menu in any other app, it'll exit the video. But the scrubber in YouTube also auto-hides after a few seconds. So it's happened a few times that I've reached to press Menu on the remote, and by the time I've done it, the scrubber auto-hid and I just exited out of the video. And of course, it lost my progress. Really amateurish stuff. edit: oh, and video titles get truncated after two lines, but there's no indicator that it's been truncated, no ellipsis, nothing -- and no way to view the full title. So if a title contains critical info, you're SOL.
bobbylarrybobby 5y ago
Yes. In my experience, the best way to watch YouTube on an Apple TV is to pull the video up on your phone in safari and AirPlay it over
mikestew 5y ago
Not being a big user of YouTube, I just kind of assumed that the AppleTV client was broken due to some tiff between Google and Apple. If I manage to get it to play a video, and that’s a 50/50 proposition at best, some bug will pop up eventually, after which I either give up or AirPlay it from my phone to the TV. So I basically don’t use YouTube on ATV. But parent comment is saying that it apparently works, but is just broke in a lot of use cases. Based on my experience, this…surprises me.
KolenCh 5y ago
I think your example of Steve calling and complaining about a color is Google’s logo. Specifically probably the shade of the yellow o. But you could be talking about another story.

by jw1224 5y ago

Shank 5y ago

I’m so glad you mentioned this. Trying to navigate to a channel from a YouTube video you’re watching is significantly impaired by the fact that the default behavior is to scrub rapidly in the video timeline, and you have to provide a very distinct “break away” gesture to navigate from the scrubber to the channel controls. It’s also extremely difficult to like and dislike videos in the app. You have to break away from the scroll bar, then hit a gear and then navigate to the like/dislike button. I’m glad it’s not just me who hates this.

marcellus23 5y ago

Most frustrating thing for me: in every other app, you hide the scrubber UI just by touching the touchpad. In Youtube, just touching does nothing, you have to press Menu/Back. That's bad enough, because I can't rely on muscle memory to hide the scrubber. I need to remember if I'm in YouTube or not, because if I hit Menu in any other app, it'll exit the video. But the scrubber in YouTube also auto-hides after a few seconds. So it's happened a few times that I've reached to press Menu on the remote, and by the time I've done it, the scrubber auto-hid and I just exited out of the video. And of course, it lost my progress. Really amateurish stuff. edit: oh, and video titles get truncated after two lines, but there's no indicator that it's been truncated, no ellipsis, nothing -- and no way to view the full title. So if a title contains critical info, you're SOL.

bobbylarrybobby 5y ago

Yes. In my experience, the best way to watch YouTube on an Apple TV is to pull the video up on your phone in safari and AirPlay it over

mikestew 5y ago

Not being a big user of YouTube, I just kind of assumed that the AppleTV client was broken due to some tiff between Google and Apple. If I manage to get it to play a video, and that’s a 50/50 proposition at best, some bug will pop up eventually, after which I either give up or AirPlay it from my phone to the TV. So I basically don’t use YouTube on ATV. But parent comment is saying that it apparently works, but is just broke in a lot of use cases. Based on my experience, this…surprises me.

KolenCh 5y ago

I think your example of Steve calling and complaining about a color is Google’s logo. Specifically probably the shade of the yellow o. But you could be talking about another story.