YouTube said in a statement Thursday that it isn’t planning to launch a new app for the Apple Vision Pro, nor will it allow its longstanding iPad application to work on the device. YouTube, like Netflix, is recommending that customers use a web browser if they want to see its content: “YouTube users will be able to use YouTube in Safari on the Vision Pro at launch.”
I don’t have faith Google could even make a good app for the device considering the iPad YouTube app is janky as shit and it’s been on the platform for years.
the question is do they have any incentive to make a killer app on a direct competitor’s platform?
Since the Android tablet space has been garbage for the last decade, I would assume they’d have at least put in some work to make the iPad app pretty solid.
But I don’t disagree with what you are saying, really. However, if a janky iPad is what they think will make people jump to Android, I have a bridge to sell them.
By garbage you mean Lenovo can offer a fast tablet with hdr, high frame rate display, 2k res, proper pen included and useful desktop mode for less than an iPad? Sorry but iPad is no longer offering competitive product in the tablet space.
Google’s core business is ultimately ad sales, and any way they can collect data on you to sell you ads, and the get you to look at those ads, is revenue for them. Sure they would be able to collect more data if they had full control over your device, but as long as you’re watching their ads at all they are making money.
yeah but this is a very niche product.
why invest whatever the fuck amount of money for 0.0001% of users to have a great ad-viewing experience, when they can just shoehorn the web app and play the ads anyway?
I’ve had zero issues what so ever with the iPad app, what’s wrong with it for you?
I use my ipad with a trackpad a lot, and often with stage manager on an external display. Youtube doesn’t play well with that set up. Oddly it’ll switch which background color to show (like from dark to light) and as a result the text can get unreadable because the text doesn’t always switch with it. The chat/info panes sometimes won’t work when you click on them. I’ve had it not let me click the share button because the share button wouldn’t load.
And, yes, Stage Manager is somewhat a niche use case, I suppose. But this isn’t a mom and pop app dev. It’s google.
Even out of Stage Manager, they don’t support the cursor targets like apps are supposed to (maybe they are just using one build and shipping everywhere and hoping for the best). PiP sometimes doesn’t work well, and you have to kill the app and restart.
They should do better with one of their flagship apps, is all I’m saying. And Apple, honestly, should do better on their end with stuff like this. They don’t even have all native apps built for the Vision Pro that comes out in a couple weeks. It’s like, you’re the most profitable company on the planet and you don’t even bother. It’s crazy.
They’ll launch their apps if/when Apple Vision Pro gains more traction.
YouTube is probably the biggest one missing, but it works just as well via a browser. Netflix has a lot of stuff but it’s far from the only horse in town nowadays (and again, it should work fine via Safari). And Spotify is easily replaceable, as song availability is 99% identical between pretty much all music streaming services. People who want a Vision Pro will get it regardless of whether Spotify is available, and they’ll likely just switch to Apple Music if they want to listen to music with the headset.
So…you can use the web version and can block all of their trackers and cookies with Safari extensions. Seems like it would be smarter for them to have their own app and get that data but whatever.
Awesome. YouTube on Safari with an adblocker spares me all that ad bullshit on my iPad and iPhone and makes YouTube actually usable, also I never saw a big difference between safari and the shitty YouTube app in’s terms of usability and you have features from the app without having to pay for.
Is that Dave2D?