love that this was built from the Apollo developer. Obviously incredibly talented.
love that this was built from the Apollo developer. Obviously incredibly talented.
So nice to see a YouTube client that makes sense on the platform it’s on. Compare to the official YT client for iPad, for example, which bizarrely uses the same tiny Material touch targets as on phones.
which bizarrely uses the same tiny Material touch targets as on phones
I personally think iPad YouTube app's touch is not too bad; but in general (not limited to YouTube), I think the UI design of web video players are all too fixated on the existing design.
For example, when not in fullscreen mode, I don't see why all the controls need to be confined to the video frame and disappear when not hovering. While this design choice has its benefits, it also presents significant drawbacks: it obscures the actual content when you're interacting with the controls (a problem that's particularly acute on smaller screens), and performing quick, repetitive actions becomes difficult because the controls aren't visible until you hover over them, among other issues. This approach to web video player UI has been a pet peeve of mine for some time.
> it obscures the actual content when you're interacting with the controls (a problem that's particularly acute on smaller screens)
What's the right trade-off here in your mind then? Leave the controls always-on/visible? On a small screen, it takes a lot of real estate (except in portrait mode), and small UI controls are a pain to use so you need to make them big enough. I struggle with this, I really don't know what is the right trade-off here.
except in portrait mode
Portrait mode is exactly what I have in my mind. You have plenty of places on the bottom of the video canvas.
For YouTube at least, you only has full-screen mode when in landscape anyway.
Not anymore, you can force portrait fullscreen In desktop for example: If you go into a vertical video with a regular "/watch?v=" URL, you can see vertical format video with regular controls
There was some way to get the same effect in android, but I can't recall right now
On iPhone the YouTube app will do full-screen in portrait mode. Grab the video title (under the video) with your finger and pull down. The rest of the UI goes away and you just get the video shown in the middle of the screen with large black areas above and below the screen.
This is besides your point but I thought I would mention it. I like controls that hide in full screen mode regardless of portrait or landscape because you want to focus on the content.
On a small screen, it takes a lot of real estate
That's why the full-screen mode exists
thrdbndndn was only advocating for always-on controls in non-fullscreen mode.
One reason people might enter fullscreen mode is to avoid seeing distracting things on the screen. Controls might be distracting.
when not in fullscreen mode, I don't see why all the controls need to be confined to the video frame and disappear when not hovering
YouTube Premium offers Premium Controls which is a sidebox with the controls like you are asking for.
what what what? I've been using Premium for years what is this feature exactly? I don't see it. Cheers.
If you tap on the settings/cog icon on a video, there’s an item for “additional settled”, which then has another item for playback controls or something.
Once you want to do anything else you have to exit everything and open it back up though, it’s not really efficient
Oh my gosh they’re paywalling video controls now wow.
You just need to accept that "user interface design" has stopped being a thing in everything but niche/pro applications for at least the past 10 years. You have "follow the trend", yes, or "design it so it looks good on screenshots", but not "user interface design".
Accept it and you will be less frustrated.
In other words, the designers are just engaging in screenshot-centric design.
It would be helpful if you you can hide the UI when pausing for screenshot, then!
Acceptance can be wise, but this is not a 10 year old problem. Look at your oven; unless you are very lucky (or picky, if you bought it yourself), it has terrible UX.
Most people don’t care enough about UX to make purchasing decisions based on it. Therefore, most companies don’t prioritize it. Therefore, most product designers have no incentive to care about UX.
This has always been true.
And extra controls appear when pausing. I get that most of the time when you pause it’s because you are not watching, but it completely obscures the use case where you want to look at a still frame.
Worst though is YouTube shorts where you can’t rewind
Oh wow, is this because I have YouTube premium? I absolutely loathe this feature, because 99% of the time I am pausing, it is because I want to read what text is on the screen. It gets completely obscured by the controls, and even the text that is visible is difficult to read because it has a darkened background. Is there a way to turn this feature off?
I also have YT premium. On desktop, I use firefox and the popout video feature. It is easily resizable and movable. Downside is that js-player controls still show on the webpage, not the popout. On ios, once paused, just tap anywhere on the video anywhere there isn't a widget. That hides all the video controls for me.
Edit: Also there are keyboard controls for going frame-by-frame, if you need that much control. Or there was last time I used it a long time ago.
Another one with a same pet peeve here.
It's especially "interesting", when the slider allows to navigate to the exact frame you want (that happens very rarely) and the information you want to see is in the subtitles burned into the video - the ones not shifting with UI controls. The UI obscures that and I have to make tens of attempts with increased sloppiness due to frustration to take it all in.
Most often it's something I keep mishearing and need subtitles to actually understand what's being talked about. For example, I keep hearing "Hello awful person" in Anton Petrov's videos. https://youtu.be/PyRf7B1Ji4A?si=bIA7S8qB_WLdLgVs&t=45
It used to be like that.
https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/websites/youtube-websit...
FYI, Vinegar is well worth a couple of bucks. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...
Install it, and delete the janky "native" app. Now Youtube is a webpage that does everything it does on a regular browser. PiP? Audio with the screen locked or in the background? Yes and yes.
Does it still block ads? I happily used Vinegar before, but it lost that functionality when YouTube’s crusade against ad blockers began (I don’t recall if it just let the ads through, or if it triggered the “Ad Blocker Detected” pop-up).
With that, YouTube single-handedly forced me to move browsers on all my devices – from Safari to Orion, where I get to use uBlock Origin. uBlock seems to have stayed a step ahead of YT since.
Set your vpn to India and buy YouTube premium there for like 1 dollar a month. Cheaper than adblockers and works everywhere
In what universe is 1 less than 0? I haven't paid one red cent for uBlock Origin.
Universes where your time isn't worthless? A low cost, fire-and-forget solution might easily out-value free.
I’m confident that installing uBlock Origin will be faster and easier than subscribing to YouTube Premium.
Until YouTube blocks you.
I'm really not arguing for any particular course of action but these options have real and potential time costs that need to be weighed against financial and mental load.
If you're using a VPN already, youtube won't block you for using an adblocker. At least, not if you don't use an account. I definitely spend less than a dollar a month in time spent keeping my adblocker working, I haven't fiddled with it in years...
Yeah, but does that work everyw-
Does it still block ads? I happily used Vinegar before, but it lost that functionality when YouTube’s crusade against ad blockers began (I don’t recall if it just let the ads through, or if it triggered the “Ad Blocker Detected” pop-up).
It does. The experience is worse than it was a couple of months ago, though, as both YouTube and the blockers have to get creative. I think it’s engaged in the general cat-and-mouse game and occasionally I see YouTube’s anti-ad blocker screen, but usually it resolves after a day or two. Overall it’s still much better than out-of-the-box YouTube.
I've been using vinegar forever(Orion browser supports PiP without extension by the way)
But it's bizarre to me how bad the PiP experience on iOS is. When you press play on your bluetooth headset it will pause the video you're playing instead play whatever was on your Music app.
If you lock your screen, it will stop playing the youtube video and then you have press play again on the lock screen to resume.
Contrast that to either third party youtube clients on Android or (Re)vanced, and it's not even close.
And it seems every app has its own PiP issues. Every iOS I'm secretly hoping that Apple will address this issue, but it never happens ...
The first problem you describe (wanting to play both music and a video?) is just weird, and I’m glad the default pehavior doesn’t do that. Your second problem is jank intentionally introduced by YouTube.
The YouTube app on our Sony TV kills me. Out of a variety of apps installed (Netflix, HBO, Disney, Apple, Prime) it's the only one that we need to adjust volume for EVERY SINGLE TIME because they decided 15 should be loud vs 30 on all the other apps. Especially frustrating when a lot of the time the first play experience in YouTube is being blasted with some kind of rapid-fire ad sequence.
Don't know about the volume difference. But haven't seen any yt ads in a long time thanks to SmartTube: https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube
The volume issue persists on SmartTube
Same on AppleTV, YouTube is louder than everything else except for Spotify which is even louder.
I've been resisting the urge to splurge on an Apple TV to try and solve this particular problem. Useful to know!
The AppleTV YouTube app is so bad that I’m convinced nobody responsible for it owns a TV.
It even forces its own built in screensavers to run instead of the OS one if the app is left paused. Who approves that?!
What Steve Jobs said about Microsoft in the 90s applies to Google today: They have no taste.
This is because of YouTube‘s obsession to build cross-platform, lowest-common-denominator apps, resulting in mediocre experiences across all the platforms they support, and rarely excellent on any single platform.
Their Apple TV app is basically a web view which doesn’t conform to any of AppleTV’s UI principles. Same as their YouTube TV app. It’s sad.
It even forces its own built in screensavers to run instead of the OS one if the app is left paused
Eh? YouTube is my most-used app on Apple TV by a country mile and I’ve never seen this, I get the tvOS screensavers. Is it because I have YouTube Premium maybe?
I agree though, it is a garbage app. Everything on a TV, from the built-in apps to Roku boxes to Apple TV use basically the same app (certainly the same layout) and it’s really quite bad.
Don't get me started on the official YT app on ChromeOS... it's so bad (one example: the seek bar was barely usable with a touchscreen) that I eventually disabled it, using the website is much better.
Same, with the added benefit that in the browser I have lots of knobs and dials I can turn with uMatrix and other Dev tools. Oh and of course, sponsor block. Youtube should be insanely grateful for sponsor block, because if not for that tool I would have canceled my premium membership because I hate seeing ads. I will simply find something else to watch if I have to watch ads.
It's on purpose though, YouTube app is designed to maximize time spent on app, not UX
This strategy has changed now as far as I can remember. Google used to have a strategy of using material on iOS, but has decided to switch to a more native UIKit feel. I imagine that will be a long transition, but it's promising.
all the youtube apps suck. I can't tell you how many times I've accidentally clicked on another video while watching the one I actually am trying to watch. If you aren't full screen they fill up half the space with giant links to other videos and there's no confirmation or option for confirmation. I'm not sure anyone who works on them actually uses them in real life situations.
I echo the author's praise of YouTube Premium. When it first came out I was like there is no way I would ever pay for such service. Being an early YouTube user, pre Google buyout, I still was in love with the platform that gave me content from real people.
Fast forward to 2020 the US election cycle broke me. I could not stand the amount of political ads that were being shoved down my throat. My kids were perma home due to COVID and we were running out of things to watch. I finally caved and got YouTube Premium. I told myself OK after this shit show of an election cycle ends I will cancel and yet here I am still paying for it. It is that good.
Yes I realize that I am part of the problem. I just got my first Amazon Prime ad tonight trying to catch up on the train wreck Wheel of Time show they are putting out... and I am going to upgrade to not have them because I simply DGAF about whatever bullshit that they are filling advertisement slots with.
$2.99 a month is worth it. Kill me now.
So a corporation acquired the platform you enjoyed using, and corrupted the user experience so much that it forced you to pay them to get the old UX back, and... you're happy about it?
Sounds like Stockholm syndrome, to be honest, with Google laughing all the way to the bank.
No ads is not sustainable. It's not like the alternative is youtube remaining ad free. The alternative is youtube shutting down.
That's a false dichotomy. There are many monetizing alternatives besides advertising, or paying the platform to remove advertising they introduced in the first place.
OK, I'll bite. What are some alternatives besides advertising or paying a fee to get no Ads?
It's not my role to come up with consumer-friendly business models, or to vouch for any specific ones. I'm just saying that, as a consumer, I don't want Google's business.
If someone is selling apples in exchange for punching me in the face (and actually watching me and doing that while I eat, for a more accurate analogy :), then I wouldn't like going to their store. I would prefer going to the farmers' market and buying directly from the farmer by paying for it with cash. Farm-to-table type of transaction. Would this make the farmer as rich as selling their apples to the face-punching store? Probably not. They would probably have to work harder for less money, because they would have to manage more of their business themselves, and their products wouldn't reach as many people. There would probably be less apple farmers overall as well. But would it be a more consumer-friendly business that is actually incentivized to put care in their product? Absolutely.
It's not my fault that there aren't more farmers' market equivalents on the web. I'll use them if/when they exist, but in the meantime I'll have to resort to acquiring my apples in alternative ways.
In your analogy when you say buying directly from the farmer by paying with cash, what does that translate to in the real world? How are you supporting content creators on YouTube if you block ads?
For most of them, I'm not. But some creators have alternative revenue streams which I do support.
This is not my problem to fix. I don't feel guilty in any way for refusing to participate in a business model I don't agree with.
It's not my role to come up with consumer-friendly business models, or to vouch for any specific ones. I'm just saying that, as a consumer, I don't want Google's business.
"The many monetisation models I claimed exist go to another school. In Canada."
With keeping the same old UX yes it is. What YouTube offers for free is very generous. There is unlimited uploads. The high resolution options are free. The site is not behind a paywall. You can make an infinite amount of playlists which each have an unlimited size. You can have unlimited tabs open. Videos get automatic transcriptions, subtitles, and translations. Your streaming does not get throttled. Every user gets their own personalized feed. etc
You are very silly to think that youtube would shut down just because you don't pay your three monthly doubloons.
As someone with a YouTube channel, from looking at my metrics it's pretty clear that YouTube is being held afloat by a) the fact that non-technical users can't easily block YouTube ads on mobile devices, and b) YouTube Premium.
A single user depriving YouTube of their revenue is inconsequential sure, but when hundreds of millions of people do it (like with blocking ads on desktop) it obviously runs the risk of making the entire company unviable. Hosting videos for free is a great way to lose a lot of money.
The alternative is youtube shutting down.
We can only hope.
I think running the biggest video platform on the planet entirely for free is not realistic. Why are you so against Google charging a minimum fee for doing that while still giving you the opportunity to watch for free in exchange for being shown a few ads? Do you think they should be run as a charity?
Why are you so against Google charging a minimum fee for doing that while still giving you the opportunity to watch for free in exchange for being shown a few ads?
I'm against it because advertising is not the only business model that works at scale. Google effectively introduced itself as a middleman between content creators and consumers, which they continue to do whether you pay with your attention/data or cash.
I happily support content creators who don't rely on advertising or Google itself. I just refuse to be forced into a corrupt business model.
What would be your ethical business model alternative to maintain YoutTube's staff, engineering, energy bill and hardware costs? Just to break even.
Not to mention paying the creators!
Google effectively introduced itself as a middleman between content creators and consumers, which they continue to do whether you pay with your attention/data or cash.
anybody else is free to introduce a content discovery & delivery scheme that would obviate the need for a advertising-laden middleman, but for some reason people keep downloading the YouTube app
I said kill me now at the end of my post and that I am part of the problem and you yet think I am happy about it? Ok you got me bud. Yep 100% Stockholm syndrome. No, I am not happy about it, but what else is there? Do you block YouTube on your network so you don't see content from that platform? I'd wager you don't.
Also, do you really think that any platform as big as YouTube can remain free forever? I will pay for things that bring value to my life. YouTube Premium brings value almost every day. I am pretty sure you pay for things that bring value or make thing easier for you in life, so maybe don't post these kinds of responses in the future as they are cynical and bring no value to the conversation.
Do you block YouTube on your network so you don't see content from that platform? I'd wager you don't.
I don't block YouTube, I just don't use any of their official frontends. There are plenty of alternatives in this space[1]. This might not work for everyone, but I get a much better UX with these tools. Not seeing ads is one benefit, but it's also about not being a participant in training algorithms that have a, mostly negative, psychological impact.
I am pretty sure you pay for things that bring value or make thing easier for you in life
Of course. And I happily support content creators who don't rely on advertising or Google itself. I just refuse to be forced into a corrupt business model.
Anyway, I didn't mean to antagonize you, so apologies if my response came across that way.
[1]: https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends?tab=readme...
You came across antagonistic, but fair enough, thanks for the apology.
Let me put it this way. I understand that you can block YouTube ads and have the techicnal means to block them at the DNS level. I also understand I can run different frontends for YouTube, but it is flat out easier and faster for me personally to not do that and to pay $22.99 a month for my entire family to enjoy ad free content. Time is money.
Also, I play a decent amount of video games and I send money monthly to content creators on said games I play. If something brings value to my life or makes things easier, I will pay for it. Just because I pay for something you do not like doesn't mean I don't support content creators via other means.
That's fine. We obviously have different opinions and priorities. I'm not saying that my approach is objectively better, or that it works for everyone.
I just found your observation that YouTube Premium is a good thing peculiar, especially coming from someone who's experienced YT pre-Google. To me it only solves part of the problem that Google introduced themselves, while still making you a participant in the other less obvious problems with the business.
Something like youtube (streaming _huge_ amounts of videos with with no monetization) was bound to either get ads or die. The corporation didn't kill it. In fact, quite the opposite: they made it so it could keep living.
it is $13.99 / month in the US now. $150/year is a lot of money - for a product you can choose not to pay and still mostly use.
I'm skipping 2 hours of ads per month for $15. IMO it's a pretty good deal.
(Assumptions: I watch 10 hours of YouTube videos per week, YouTube shows 30 seconds of ads per 10 minutes of video)
But does it block the ads that are still shown with youtube premium?
Indy developer charges $5 for app to access 1.78 trillion dollar company’s ad-driven video sharing platform.
I'm not sure what your point is. Should they not charge anything?
It’s a solo developer, a guy.
'they' is a great pronoun for ambiguous cases of sex & plurality
It's a terrible pronoun since that usage is a retrofit of a word intended to be used as a plural.
Singular they dates back to the 14th century. Isn't 600 years long enough to stop quibbling over it?
Was here to say the same thing. OP ignoring history to double-down on gender bigotry is disappointing to find on HN.
Do you also avoid “you” when referring to just one person?
So just like "you"? What's þi problem?
I know an individual who used to think like that; do you want to know why they changed their mind?
Retrofit? The singular they has been used in English literature as far back as the 13th century, not exactly recent
My native language doesn't have gendered pronouns, so I make an explicit point of using "they" for a pronoun every time I can.
There is no ambiguity here.
This is not reddit however have to say relevant username :'-)
Bad hill to die on.
1.78 trillion dollar company could have made app, or even better, not disable the iPad version in contempt.
is it contempt or simply a negotiation tactic?
Does it matter?
It would matter to me, or maybe a Vision Pro user. If Google is holding out as a negotiation tactic, there may be an official app in the future, if Apple compromises on revenue share.
If it is contempt or another reason, maybe the possibility if an official app is less likely.
Again, as a user, why is this our problem?
Let's all stop picking sides when trillion dollar companies fight each other at the expense of an open inter-operable Internet.
If you want an open internet don’t use the app and just use the website that works.
Good grief
I think you missed my point there, but yes I agree with you on that.
That seems pretty fair given the work put in to make what appears to be a much better experience than having to use it in the browser in VisionOS
They surely have their own business plan for AR/VR that you're not aware of.
Christian isn’t charging enough! This could easily be $10 or more.
I still grumble every time I use the Reddit app. RIP Apollo.
While not as good as Apollo the "Dystopia for reddit" (iOS) or the "Red Reader" (android) are both better than the official reddit app.
Dystopia is excellent not only because it's free but because it is great for people with poor eyesight like myself, allowing for pretty big fonts that are broken on the official iOS Reddit App. The only alternative way I've found to achieve this is to browse Reddit with Safari and use page zoom.
I'm still missing Apollo quite a lot. Narwhal2 is good and comes close but it's not exactly there.
thanks for reminding me to double check my stylesheets for big text compatibility.
I always used to think that accessibility is for blind people, text readers and all that shit. Turns out that over the years accessibility ends up catching you one way or the other.
Yo just for this incident reddit should be fined, but not peanuts, like 10-20% their revenue. Any business that discriminates disabled people mustn't be a business IMHO
Don't worry. The EU will teach them a lesson when they're done with everyone else. Thank god we have the EU to balance US.
iOS has Narwhal 2, as well. It’s got its own subscription to defray the API costs but it’s a reasonable price.
Seriously, what percentage of people who just spent at least $3,500 on the hardware would quibble over an extra $5 when it comes to as essential a native app as Youtube?
I didn't buy the hardware, but if I had, I would quibble over the extra $5.
No, seriously. I would.
Here's the basic problem:
* I wouldn't mind spending $10 on something which I know I'm using.
* Most apps sit on my phone unused. Most are horrible. I have no idea before I buy whether it's good or horrible for me.
* I often don't mind spending a buck or two on something to see if I'll use it. $10 is right above that threshold.
* No apps do a decent free trial. I'm busy, so one of the 30-day things doesn't work for me. I'll install it, and when / if I get around to using it, the trial is already done. My life doesn't revolve around the app. Likewise, many apps will limit functionality to where the free trial is basically an advertisement, and I don't see if it's something I'd use.
I think what would work for me (n=1) is:
* The app is free for the first 40 hours of actual use. Or perhaps some annual quota.
* Continuing using it beyond that costs e.g. $20 for something simple like a video player and e.g. $100 for something complex like a video editor.
That aligns incentives right too.
For a video player, I don't think I'd use one without the option for an ad blocker. I'm not getting Youtube Premium no matter how cheap or expensive it is, since I don't think it'd be unethical for me to do so (it's a bit of a broken social contract by Google). That's another story (and I'm not trying to push my values on anyone else).
The app is only $5.
Best case scenario: you get an app you use all the time for almost nothing and are supporting an independent developer making cool stuff.
Worst case scenario: you never use the app but supported an independent developer with a tiny donation.
The question wasn't over $5. The question was over an extra $5, for a total of $10. $5 is basically the upper bound of where I'm willing to experiment.
The question is also very much about whether I am "supporting an independent developer with a tiny donation." A lot of stuff on app stores is spammy, scammy, and I explicitly don't want to support. Our dollars determine where our resources (as a society) go. I don't mind supporting good things, even with donations. I am currently fighting a company over <$3 which they got by fraud, not because it's worth my time, but because it's my civic duty; if I don't, they'll scam another million people.
The audience are HN readers -- entrepreneurs trying to make apps. The point isn't about me as what I ought to be doing (or about convincing others to be like me). The point is to honestly give customer insight, again, with an n=1. If enough people do that, there's a sample bias, but you do get better insight than nothing.
I'm probably going to stop doing that since "customers doing what we don't like" increasingly leads to downvotes. Either I'm communicating badly, people reading are increasingly bad at reading comprehension, or some combination there-of. These posts used to be valued a few years back.
However, as much as it didn't come across, the take-home message was intended to be that if you're running an honest business, you want to (and can) charge me more if you:
1) Clearly signal you're not evil. E.g. my data is treated with respect, you won't scam me, etc.
2) Give me enough information to be able to determine it's a product I want.
That's basic transparency, and a lot of startups lose my business because they screw it up.
Not everyone is greedy and profiteering
I basically just stopped using Reddit after that whole fiasco. I had already been drifting away for years. The site has changed. It was time to move on.
I still selfhost a libreddit instance for search results but no more browsing
That sounds very useful, how much space does it utilize?
Same here. Twitter as well
I started using Yesterday for Old Reddit. It’s a safari extension which makes old.reddit.com very mobile friendly!
In general I would agree but charging $10 for something that can be shut down tomorrow just because google doesn't like it seems a bit much.
He admits it uses the official embed API, doesn't block or skip ads and generally plays nice with their systems. He's not trying to circumvent anything, he's just filling a gap left by Google themselves.
It would be quite the precedent for Google to shut someone down who is technically playing by all their rules.
(Yes I'm sure the ToS allows them to do this if they want to - but it would be a bad look).
Lots of apps block YouTube ads by default. Including Brave
I'm quite liking Winston for Reddit.
You can sideload without jailbreak, it perfectly works!
Does it block ads? It doesn’t, I don’t think Google would like that, but if you have YouTube Premium you won’t see ads, just like the website.
I just realised that a new product means new eco system, means less/no customization possibilities.
What a wonderful world...
I wouldn't necessarily call it a new ecosystem. It's mostly the same walled garden that runs iOS/iPadOS.
Walled gardens don't just keep rabbits out of the carrots, or kids safe from wolves, they keep the walking dead out of Hilltop.
https://walkingdead.fandom.com/wiki/Hilltop_Colony_(TV_Serie...
Would you mind explaining your position a little more? Are you saying that walled gardens keep evil away, or are you saying that they can hurt the user?
Walled gardens keep attention-span-harvesting profits on the inside.
Walled gardens keep attention-span-harvesting profits on the inside.
A few different counters:
1. Steam is on an "open" platform and charges the same 30% for the marketplace access value as the rest of the industry, whether open or appliance/console, including Apple. So it is memetic but incorrect to argue that Apple being "walled garden" is causing Apple to take more from devs than other places devs can market their wares.
2. Apple's "ingredient labeling" telling users what personal data is being harvested and resold has changed a variety of apps' practices so the data is not, in fact, exfiltrating. In general, big tech is mad about this labeling, and wants out of it, since "profits" associated with secret resale of personal data are being prevented .. not kept inside. For what happens elsewhere, one need look no further than the $5B settlement from Chrome "Incognito" mode:
- https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/google-agrees-to...
3. If the argument is "attention span harvesting" means "ads" that package and sell users to advertisers, and that that is what Apple is gate keeping, on the contrary, the adtech ecosystem profits are not being kept "on the inside":
- https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/1722057?hl=en
- https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10384955?hl=en
4. Coincidentally, Juno (what this HN post is about) is a one-time purchase. Nothing about attention-span harvesting from the garden or wall. It's app makers who are choosing the user-hostile attention-span harvesting, which causes them to be misaligned with users and Apple.
1. Steam is on an "open" platform and charges the same 30% for the marketplace access value as the rest of the industry, whether open or appliance/console, including Apple. So it is memetic but incorrect to argue that Apple being "walled garden" is causing Apple to take more from devs than other places devs can market their wares.
Steam has put a lot of effort into being the best place to buy games, and if a developer doesn't like it they're allowed to sell to customers on the same devices through a different store.
If there were no threat of competition, would Steam be as good as it is?
If the App Store did have competition, would it be better?
incorrect to argue that Apple being "walled garden" is causing Apple to take more from devs than other places devs can market their wares.
I thought you just said that Steam was on an open platform that doesn't choose how much they charge developers? Compared to iOS and the App Store, it's a very different situation; Steam is actually motivated to compete.
In general, big tech is mad about this labeling
Source? I kinda think Apple has the API coverage to make this an OS-level or app-level feature instead of an App Store one. If not then they better start investing in that technology.
"ads" that package and sell users to advertisers, and that that is what Apple is gate keeping,
Where is Apple gatekeeping advertisement? Seems to me that they barely care, as long as you conform to their App Store standards. They even sell their own targeted (but of course, respectful) ads: https://searchads.apple.com/
which causes them to be misaligned with users and Apple.
For one, users don't care. Go on, go ask your mom how often she thinks about YouTube targeted advertisement when she's looking up chicken recipes.
For two, Apple only pretends to care. If you make a time-wasting, attention-span harvesting sinkhole gatcha game, Apple will welcome you into their platform with open arms. They operate so many double standards that threatening a company breakup a-la Microsoft antitrust is starting to look like the most sensible solution.
Steam is different because there is a great sense of ownership on one's steam game library - to the point that one has family control PINs and passwords, and can share or hide or private games, wishlists and gifts to and fro.
---
Walled gardens (paywalls) around 1-time consumed content is bs, mostly.
"Information wants to be free - but we plan to monitize freedom through paywalls" is the content business model of Ye Olde Gaard Media... where the paper you were reading todays* news on had significant cost to deliver that story to your eyeballs - such as a medium empire to own the substrate for the narrative presented to you (Hurst's lumber paper empire and the demise of hemp as a paper product)
And the insane amount of control that supply chain enabled - thus the entitled archetype seen in the DNA of all media companies.
so - walled gardens, are an old model. Especially for sites that are digital pheonix of their prior paper media empire...
This is why I think that any linking to New York Time on HN should be banned - so annoying, HN isnt US-centric, exclusively and it shouldnt have so many expectations that its users want to pay NYT for anything.
(paywalls promote title-clickbate-commenting, because you want to engage in the topic without paying for the full context of the article clickbaiting you...
Maybe they’re just complaining that AMC is t making an app for Vision Pro.
Actually I think The Walking Dead is available via AppleTV so they’re already inside the walls.
"Google layoffs x percent of its employees". HN: Fckin Google!
"Here is an option to support a platform you use without watching ads". HN: Go fck yourself!
Do you think Google pays their employees directly from Youtube ad revenue?
What do you think Google pays their employees with?
As little a share of it as they can get away with, in other words market rate wages
… which they fund from what source?
That is definitely what I implied. /s
Right, won't someone please think of the poor little underpaid corporate behemoth.
Talented developer for sure, but has a knack for developing software that piggy backs of silicon valley giants that can turn off access at a moments notice.
I don't understand what reasonable alternative there could be. Develop your own YouTube?
Alternative to what?
Most devs work on projects that don’t actively compete with large companies on their own ground.
Or do you mean alternative to watching video on Vision - I suppose youtube still works via safari, is that not the case?
Alternative to working with a big silicon valley giant. If you want to integrate/use YouTube you need to deal with whatever that company puts you up with. And as the article states, you don't want them to become grumpy at you; otherwise, they will turn you off even quicker. The only alternative I see is to develop a new YouTube, which seems unreasonable given how dominant Google is.
You don’t need a direct alternative to youtube to stop using youtube. You can just not deal with it, or access it via browser when needed, and use other platforms/media more instead. It might even become irrelevant on its own, like facebook and google search are slowly becoming.
But sure, if that’s not enough and you need a clone of youtube then yes, you need to develop a new youtube.
For certain values of "reasonable":
Peertube is one distributed option[0].
Many content creators have started hosting videos on other services like Patreon because of Youtube's censorship and demonetization policies. Which doesn't entirely avoid the centralization problem but it's better not to put all of your eggs in one basket.
It's also possible (although obviously not always feasible) to self-host or torrent.
Thanks for the link. I didn't know Peertube, yet.
I can't see how you can avoid the centralization problem and also have decent monetization for the videos. But I want to certainly become convinced that it can work. Crypto made me a decentralization skeptic.
I think the idea was that they would develop apps that don't require the giants. Which sure, could be your own YouTube, but more often it's a smaller in scope project because you're a solo dev. If i understand them correctly, they're just acknowledging the risk.
Ie work in a way that doesn't require the giants shadow, as the giant may move unexpectedly. The shade can be quite lucrative though, if you're nimble.
That’s more of a statement of the monopolization of hardware access the App Store gives than it is him “piggy backing”. It’s not like you have a real choice without Apple being forced to allow software downloads via a web browser globally.
I think they meant more about being beholden to Youtube's current implementation.
That’s valid
Or they might just find the user experience lacking and want to improve on it.
I make all sorts of small apps and utilities because to improve usability of services i consume. It doest mean I'm some lackey to big corp.
Making something like youtube would be much easier technically than it would have been in 2006 or so. A solo dev could create a small scale streaming service for HTML5 video pretty reasonably.
It's the copyright that's the problem. You would be annihilated, not by YouTube's lawyers, but by UMG and Sony's lawyers, immediately after getting even a small amount of traction.
I'm assuming this developer is aware of that, and will move on to the next thing as soon as Google develops their own Youtube Vision OS app.
What other choice you have?
Anyway YouTube aren’t going to disable embeds. So don’t see it being turned off
Here's an almost trivial bit of "permissionless innovation" thanks to Silicon Valley giants:
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111049822586450100
30 years ago somebody who wanted to develop a "new object you can use to distribute music" had to spend $100 million on some project like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette
today it is very simple because almost everyone has a player in their pocket that connects the card to software which runs in the cloud. It wouldn't be technically difficult at all for me to host the music file in S3, R2 or Azure storage and the storage and network costs are insignificant so far as I expect these cards to be distributed. If I did that I could get in trouble over copyright, so a link to YouTube is a safe and easy solution w/ the disadvantage that people in many geographies can't view licensed music videos.
Fortunately that QR code is a redirect and I can send it to another service. I demoed the cards with quite a few people and found that they usually felt it was a letdown to go to YouTube (maybe because they go to YouTube all the time and there is nothing special about it) but that there was more satisfaction with a link to SongWhip which might send them to YouTUbe in the end but gives them a feeling of agency at the expense of another click.
Only a matter of time until G blocks access to whatever API he is using or throttles it. YT invests a shit ton of money to ensure you use the official YT app to make sure you view their stupid ads, pump their ad profits, or buy YoUtUbE PrEmIuM
looks good though! Won't be adopting the apple vision pro for awhile. but the developers pushing their apps to this ecosystem will definitely be awarded for early adoption until "native" apps are made available.
pump out a AVP app. early adopters of AVP likely to buy ($5-$10). Rake in that easy money while the big companies take their time in building their own app. Big companies then throttle or block those apis used by indy developers or require fee to use them. Indy developers likely to halt development and thus people end up on the official apps.
At its core, Juno uses the YouTube website itself. No, not scraped. It presents the website as you would load it, but similar to how browser extensions work, it tweaks the theming of the site through CSS and JavaScript.
I don't know why it matters much, there is a near limitless plethora of tools one can use to do agent profiling, meaning that if Google cared enough they could still engage in hostile behavior to break the product in various ways.
they can probably go at it with just lawyers
they could, but on the other hand there are a lot of apps like vanced/newpipe that still exist, so... Not just that, if under the hood the dev is using webkit+some extension-like blocking, it'll again be pretty hard to block and I'm not sure google is willing to invest effort/money in investigating this, esp considering that afaik juno doesn't even block ads
So kind of like adblock works
Google already did this before, to Microsoft on Windows Phone.
No idea why this comment was downvoted. YouTube (Google) can easily get Apple to ban unauthorized third party apps.
Once YouTube releases support for the Vision Pro, either Google will get Juno banned as an unauthorized third party app or make the API expensive to use even if Juno becomes popular.
pump out a AVP app. early adopters of AVP likely to buy ($5-$10). Rake in that easy money while the big companies take their time in building their own app. Big companies then throttle or block those apis used by indy developers or require fee to use them. Indy developers likely to halt development and thus people end up on the official apps.
Precisely. Unfortunately the creator of Apollo has not learned anything about what happened to his reddit client and the same will certainly happen with this YouTube client.
How do you record the POV from the Vision Pro goggles?
These were recorded in the simulator as stated in the article by Christian. However there is a recording mode on the device itself as well, although as I don't have one I don't know the specifics.
I see, thank you. I was watching MKBHD and Brian Tong on YT and they were using extensive actual POV recording: https://youtu.be/GkPw6ScHyb4
In those reviews it looks like a mix of screen recording (what the user sees), and you can also record and take pictures from the onboard cameras (headset PoV). Thanks to the passthrough, screen recording will often also capture the room and the users hands.
well now those rooms look totally rendered! :)
There’s a screen record function, the same as the rest of iOS. MKBHD uses it extensively in his review video.
Thanks
The screenshots in the post are likely from the simulator.
Is there already a word for this fetish of putting your fate in the hands of big companies not shutting you down from their APIs?
Fetishes are sexually derrived or worship of an idol. Are you calling them losers for not scraping?
Masochists, more like.
I assume that Christian Selig made enough money with Apollo before it was shut down to make it a worthwhile business, even if it was not forever. He seems to be doing just fine despite a big company shutting him down.
Why do you think this is a flawed decision to do so ? In my opinion this is a conscious choice by Selig both times and a good one.
There are business models where venture funding is unsuitable as there will never be hockey stick growth or unit economics or competitive moats etc, traditionally companies usually small operate here, they are not startups, just SMB doing non flashy stuff.
Similarly also many business models unsuitable talented product teams to risk on , that are perfect for a highly talented freelancer such as Christian Selig - like third party API dependent ideas.
He is amongst the best indie developers in the Apple ecosystem and doesn't have to worry about competition quality too much in these ideas.
These are four main ways that I know of, to be a professional talented product developer -
1. Become a founder, raise funding, chase growth and do things you don't really like anymore
2. Freelance and do boring consulting work, trying to keep customer happy
3. Work in a big bureaucratic tech company and be frustrated constantly with everything from politics to red tape.
4. Pour your heart and soul into a early stage startup and watch it either outgrow you or crash and burn.
He instead gets to build products at a massive scale without having any overhead of an organization, and also making decent amount of money (upwards of few million/year with Apollo), what more can a developer aspire for ?
marketshareophelia
Capitalism
Let’s ask some of the people who made a fortune out of doing it. Entrepreneurial, maybe?
So I dunno, if you can afford an expensive Apple Vision Pro, I’d really consider treating yourself to YouTube Premium!
The reason I don't have premium (and one of the reasons I block ads) is that I don't want YouTube tracking my viewing habits, which I cannot prevent if I'm forced to log in to access premium.
It has nothing to do with monetary cost. I'm always surprised when I see statements like this one that appear to be completely ignorant of this aspect.
Does their Incognito Mode meet your needs?
No, because I don't trust them. Otherwise I wouldn't have to worry in the first place.
I love this comic on-topic:
https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/11gxpcu/our_little_...
I think most people log in to YouTube specifically so YouTube can see what they look at and show them more content like that and sync across their device, even when they don't have Premium. Yours is a tiny tiny niche use case, even among people who would pay for a YT app.
They track you whether you are logged in or not. I really don't think it is easy to escape their tracking.
Stopping Google's tracking isn't as big a priority to most people as it seems to be to you (otherwise google would be out of business). So it shouldn't really be all that surprising when people make statements that aren't about stopping google's tracking.
This looks beautiful. I think Alphabet just won a more premium app than they might have made by choosing not to play. I hope a Quest port might happen someday.
There might be less incentive for a Quest port because there's already an official YouTube app that works quite well on the platform.
It's not meant for MR like this. An immersive app for YouTube that let you have a window management experiece closer to the Vision Pro would be welcome.
For the record, both the YouTube app and YouTube in the built-in browser seem to work just fine in mixed reality / passthrough (at least on my Quest 3), but the big feature they're both missing from Juno's feature list is resizable MR windows.
Would love to see a Juno port at some point if it includes this too!
Edit: According to the Internet, apparently there is actually a way to resize the MR windows (their "switch view" button lets you resize them); I'm apparently just blind. Would still love to see a Juno port though; more options is always good.
You can resize windows by clicking and dragging the corner of the window.
I might be missing it but I don't see any mention of actual VR videos (180 and 360).
It probably would require a huge dev effort to support, but that's definitely a miss compared to the offical Quest app.
AFAIK this is a webview that Christian is hijacking certain navigation events on. So the app itself isn't really native/probably wouldn't support this feature.
I think $5 is _beyond_ fair, considering every user will have dropped >$3k on hardware.
With that logic every app that is free on an iPhone pro max must be unfair.
If you think that for every fact in life, the inverse is also true, then you're bad at logic.
If developers could price apps differently for the cheap Vs expensive iPhones, they would.
For apps that run exclusively on brand new iPhone pro max's, sure.
...but seeing as that isn't the case.
Conversely, if I spent $3.5k on a device, I'm not paying a cent more to watch YouTube on it.
You would certainly be in the minority, Apple profits alone state that people are more then willing to pay an excessively large sum of money for products and then buy $1000 stands.
If you're into self-hosting there is https://github.com/iv-org/invidious which works great with https://github.com/yattee/yattee for macOS/iOS/tvOS.
This combo is amazing, haven't looked back ever since I deployed it with docker.
Hopefully Yattee will make a native visionOS app in the future.
Does this system provide the same level of content recommendations as the Youtube homepage? If so then I'll set it up tonight!
There aren’t recommendations like youd see on the YouTube front page. There are “next video” recommendations like YouTube though
Part of the appeal for these privacy front-ends is the zero tracking, so you don't get the hyper-aware recommendations of normal YouTube. I'd say if that's a major selling point to you, you probably wouldn't enjoy Invidious.
Though, I'd recommend people try self curating a list of subscriptions and discover new videos a more organic way (friends making recommendations, or seeing videos on HN or Reddit). I personally have found my YouTube experience to be less distracting when I started using Invidious.
Also in this realm, for Roku there is https://github.com/iBicha/playlet which works great when hooked up to my self-hosted Invidious instance.
Question for Christian: doesn't YouTube limit the player when using the embed API (max resolution for example) ?
He answers this on the website: "...There’s no API keys, or limits to how many times a day you can call it..."
Have you never had an issue while using an embedded video on a website ? Whether a message "it cannot be played, go to YouTube", or trying to select a high-resolution, or subtitles and failing ?
He addresses this:
The one downside is that occasionally you’ll get a creator who disabled playback for YouTube embeds. This is rare, especially with videos made in the last few years, but for those Juno will auto-detect that and just load up the normal video website page rather than the fancy player.
That answers my question about the embeds not playing at all (thank you, that's what I get for speed reading), but I'm curious if there are other limitations.
Why do this when YouTube would have one eventually? This isn’t like Reddit client, I’ve never heard of a 3rd party YouTube client. Is he doing it for fun or just to get the initial impatient $$ before YouTube shows up?
The worst part of being an early adopter (very first world problems) is that nothing exists yet. When 4k HDR was first being supported, a couple of Netflix shows were there and... not much else (some YouTube videos of dubious quality) VisionOS is going to have a lot of new app developer excitement, and that's good! YouTube is one of the most used apps on my phone, $5 seems pretty reasonable.
I’ve never heard of a 3rd party YouTube client.
There are plenty of cool 3rd party youtube clients. SmartTube, NewPipe and Invidious come to mind. Youtube Revanced could be considered as 3rd party youtube client as well.
You didn’t use an iPhone before iOS6? Hate to break it to you but they took quite a few years with the last platform!
Just wondering, how does the logistics of pricing it at a one time purchase work? Isn’t there a $99/year Apple developer program?
He's probably hoping to get more than 20 purchases.
It’s $5. Can you imagine it remaining supported in 5 years?
I can't even begin to describe how excited I am about the Vision Pro and how much I want it to be everything it claims to be! Are there any info available from people who have received their headsets that are 'standard' production versions, and not Apple supplied early access versions? I want to hit that order button, but the rational me tells me to wait for some initial real life reviews to roll in.
They’re the same thing you’ll get at retail
I think the MKBHD video is on a normal consumer one
I miss Apollo every day :(
I tried using the official client for a while but just couldn't stand it and switched back to Apollo about a month ago.
Sideloadly + ApolloPatcher was surprisingly easy to set up. Who knows how long it'll last, but it's basically set and forget once you create the Reddit+imgur API keys and enable wifi sync/auto refresh.
I always kind of liked Apollo, but I never saw what was so exceptional about it. These days, I use Narwhal 2, and I can't say I miss any functionality from Apollo. For my use, Narwhal is just as good as Apollo on the iPhone, and vastly superior on the iPad.
and YouTube still gets to show ads
Is this true? I have never seen an ad on my embedded youtube player. Which I was honestly kind of bummed about, as I wanted some way to give back to the creators of the tutorials I was rendering.
Which I was honestly kind of bummed about, as I wanted some way to give back to the creators of the tutorials I was rendering.
I'm sure they'd be happy to take direct donations. Many have Patreon accounts you can subscribe to. Those creators aren't getting any meaningful revenue from ads; that's why they all added those annoying sponsor segments.
If I had any revenue, I’d be happy to share it. In reality I bear the full cost of all the resources required to host the site at the benefit of the community with no ads or anything else to offset it, and despite having several thousand active users nobody has interacted with the prominent “tip {channel name}” buttons I added.
I’d love if folks could use my site as a 0-guilt alternative to watching the same videos on youtube (plus lots of AI-enhanced goodness), but with the ads stripped away its not quite the same.
Brought to you by the man who created Apollo for Reddit.
For reference, please see the #2 top post on Reddit in the last year.
This is the impact that a single developer can have.
If that's not inspirational, then I don't know what is.
All I see is a picture of a dick-shaped 9/11 memorial..
Just wait until Google blocks Juno, just like they did to Microsoft on Windows Phone when they created their own client.
To be fair, there were plenty of 3rd party YouTube clients on Windows Phone that they didn't block (I even payed for one). They only really didn't want an official YouTube app to exist on Windows Phone, and the same will likely be true for VisionPro (even assuming that Google wants to try to bury VisionOS like they did with Windows - which is not clear yet). And a payed YouTube app will obviously have a tiny install base on any platform, so they don't really care.
Does it block ads? It doesn’t
Having recently tried to watch Youtube on iPad without an adblocker, I discovered Youtube advertising. It's insufferable. Ads appear every few minutes, and they're not like the TV ads of yore. They're exclusively get-rich-quick schemes with people explaining how they're able to earn $10,000 a month doing nothing -- all one has to do is go to that website and subscribe to a shady course.
Fortunately Brave still blocks ads successfully, even on an iPad. Without it, it would be unusable. I wonder who puts up with this.
I think youtube ads are terrible and frequent because youtube decided they have no competition and if people want to watch videos, they'll either put up with that shit or pay for premium which is what youtube actually wants.
Why do you need an app when you can watch it on the web browser?
but YouTube.com stinks — it’s a minefield of UI targets that are too small for eye-tracking’s precision [0]
I wish Google is the the Blockbuster of our time, making money off nefarious patterns just to be replaced completely by something more novel ...that ends up making money off nefarious patterns
This looks awesome. Christian, you mention comments as a possible future feature -- I think the idea of a livestream off in the corner with comments as a separate spatial box might be nice. I don't like to leave streams on while I'm doing other things, but lots of younger folk I know do, and part of the stream consumption experience is the comments.
There’s no API keys, or limits to how many times a day you can call it
Yet. Just like with Apollo and Reddit API, at some point there weren’t any.
What is the point? Just load up youtube.com press a video full screen it then drag the window around your vision UI
I like how Christian Selig find big tech problematic UI/Ux products and fix that with an app.
Very cool
Such a good read. This Apollo dev has a good worldview
This look very very cool!
This feels like an early iPhone app launch in the best of ways.
A little off topic but absence of a first party app like YouTube is notable and will really hurt AVP - as intended of course.
Great moves, great write up. This is simple world class software decision making
Needs VR video support. :)
Does it block ads? It doesn’t, I don’t think Google would like that
I suspect Google already doesn't like what you're doing. They chose to make their own app unavailable on the AVP even though it sounds like it would be trivial for them to do so. Whatever their reasons are, I doubt they're keen about a third party stepping in with an alternative.
I'm amazed that someone who has been this badly burned by a corporation controlling their API access would even think about writing another app that uses third-party APIs, to be honest.
If you had read the article you would find that this app doesn't really need YouTube API access. It's just an iframe. It's 1998 tech.
In that case, isn’t it a race to the bottom with just someone else doing something similar? What makes this special?
I thought the article did a good job addressing it. There were a lot of nice touches which make this app work well with the vision pro.
The fact that he wrote the apollo app? I don’t know. It’s not exactly revolutionary is it
Good product is first about understanding the user and the problem statement very well foremost. Most product moats are just that, everything else is a function of that.
Designing a great UX to interact with the system is the other key ingredient, that requires step 1 and also a great deal of creativity.
Anyone can copy same the features after someone as good as Christian Selig has made an app, Few can do similar or better starting on their own, especially indie developers, so he can always be ahead if he wants to.
Christian also chooses apps to work which are third party platform controlled for a reason I think. He can operate in markets like this as a extremely talented indie developer that very few competent teams with capital funding would attempt with platform risk. Beeper is the most recent example on Apple, Christian himself got burned in Reddit[1][2].
Finally he prices at a point so low that people are just paying for the brand - for a well designed reliable software which won't crash on them.
He likely will not lose all that much sales if a lower priced/free product comes out Safari browser based Youtube.com is already there .
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[1] He can afford to in the sense his monthly cash burn is very low compared to any normal company and he doesn't have 100's of employees to worry about if he gets kicked out.
[2] Even then he has carefully choose an API that Google will have a hard time just blocking him ( and not every other use of embedded playback), and he also is careful not to use APIs to render the UI he has just skinned the main website with light CSS.
"There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat."
Technology doesn't need to be "special" to be useful.
If you have a link to the other similar ones that would be useful.
It's the first one so it's currently the best one. If someone else makes a worse app, why would you use it? I don't get what's confusing here.
Nothing makes this special, maybe a well-known indie developer.
The iframe embed API is API access, and YouTube can remove, paywall, or rate limit it any time they want. How old the underlying technology is is completely irrelevant to that.
Unlike Reddit, Apollo was stopping users from seeing ads and Reddit gaining ad revenue from them, so they went to charge the Reddit app devs for this loss in revenue.
The YouTube embed API supports ads, and works perfectly with Premium so Google are not losing any potential revenue with this app existing.
Sounds like Christian learned his lesson with his experience with Reddit: "don't get in the way of the company's ad revenue".
Your statement still stands though, you are ultimately correct.
That's an interesting way to frame the reddit debacle. Reddit could have mandated ads to be displayed as a part of their TOS of API usage, but just decided not to - for the clear reason of centralizing users to their app. It wasn't /just/ about the loss of revenue - it was also about the metrics they can collect on their platform which they could not do on others'.
YouTube disabling embedding would be fucking insane.
You don't need third-party APIs to make a YouTube viewer. There's a bunch of 3rd-party YouTube viewers like SmartTube, ReVanced, etc. that bypass ads and don't use the official API, plus of course the yt-dlp downloader.
I'd say the lesson here is NOT to rely on official APIs.
However, upon reading this blog post, it does seem he's using the official API so I guess he thinks he'll be fine as long as he doesn't block ads. Time will tell.
The idea of strapping something to my face that's going to project ads into my eyeballs that I cannot look away from--well, let's say it's pretty clear technology took a wrong term some time ago.
Apple should do the right thing and enforce a strong "no ads" policy for this product. Keep it premium for people who shell out thousands of dollars for it.
You can get rid of the ads on YouTube by paying 0.4% of the Vision Pro base model price per month.
That does nothing for all the "sponsor segments" embedded in the videos.
Try sponsorblock, or stn which includes it.
AFAIK, sponsorblock isn't going to work with a 3rd-party YouTube viewer app like this.
Yeah, I guess STN (a viewer app in which sponsorblock works) is of the variety that TFA says makes Google "grumpy."
You can look away from it. The OS doesn’t give apps access to the eye tracking info.
A lot of the internet would break if YouTube removed/tweaked their embedded video player so I doubt he has to worry.
Keep in mind that this didn't prevent Facebook and Twitter doing the same, Google is just behind with these patterns, just like with everything else
I wanted my bot to "see" a youtube video and sum it up - so me being the naïve 1998 kid me, spent like 2 hours setting up the API access to get the transcript of a video only to realize I can use this API only on videos I uploaded which is a complete bullshit because as soon as that happened I ditched it and wrote a script using puppeteer scraping the the transcript of ANY video, which ironically took less time than setting up the API.
So yeah I learned my lesson I should not resort to piracy, but start with it
He's not selling it as a subscription so there's very little downside. Some people will send him $5 and if/when YouTube cuts it off (can they really?) he doesn't really owe anyone anything.
It's called "Juno for YouTube" so they could definitely send a cease and desist for the YouTube trademark.
It uses the magic word: “for”
They’ll probably still send a C&D but it will be defensible.
But.. aren't most of the c&d defensible? It's like a mafia scare tactic to dominate something - sometimes just the "or else" destroys ppl lives
It seems that he found a (momentary?) gap in the Vision Pro app market and promptly seized the opportunity.
Absolutely. He's an indie product hacker who we could all learn from.
"oh, he's entirely reliant on the platforms!"
Meanwhile, his cap table is himself, he does quite well, and doesn't owe anything to anybody.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/largest-spca-fund...
Nah this approach is solid. It’s web views not api. It’s basically a web browser. I imagine other iOS browsers like brave will come to vision and have YouTube etc video playback and demonstrate it’s tolerated even with Adblock probably. But maybe easier to get by if more clearly a multipurpose web browser.
Seems like a lot of the motivation was just recouping lost revenue from his existing YouTube player integration code.
I have a feeling is going to be a speedrun of the reddit saga. Google obviously doesn't want a smooth youtube experience on vision pro.
Why is that? Obviously they don’t want a third party app to be that experience, but they make native apps for everything else.
Also, Christian can’t help himself but attach his apps to large companies that can cut him off overnight. Haha.
They do. But it's difficult to call anything they make "smooth." Google does some decent backend stuff but their frontend experience is not.
Everything Google does in their own ecosystem is smooth.
Not as smooth as Apple.
I don’t know if that’s still true. The Music app is still sluggish, Notes has poor UX, almost every built-in app has a better third-party replacement. It has been downhill since iOS 7.
Has it ever been the case that the built-in apps are the best in their category? Should it be the case? Apple's strategy seems to be to make a simple offering that appeals to most people, and to leave the advanced/special/power features to third-party developers. I think that's a pretty healthy arrangement, though I bet many devs would prefer Apple not offer defaults in some categories at all.
What's so poor about Apple Notes? It's my most used app. Just curious.
What the replacements for contacts and clock would be?
And in all 3 cases, the Google equivalents are worse. History shows they’ll probably just be replaced with a different product to solve the same problem which will be worse in its own ways.
Subjective, but I use both Android and iOS daily. Interesting byproduct of Android being the favorite of those obsessed with customization is that the stock apps are almost universally bad because everyone just replaces them with different niche alternatives.
until the product gets killed
the android youtube / music app is much better than any other audio / video app i have including spotify, netflix
Come on.
The YouTube Music app blocks you from navigating to a different song at the same time as playing a track if it decides that the track is primarily aimed at under 18s (such as the theme from a retro cartoon).
It's UI might charitably be described as a total catastrophe.
That is a COPPA compliance thing and is true on the regular YouTube app as well:
https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/01/30/why-youtube-videos-...
Operating system fatigue, supporting three native apps as well as apples own browser engine is a lot of engineering time.
End of the day Vision Pro needs YouTube more than YouTube needs it.
On the other hand, I have to imagine that to some extent YouTube is making maintaining their apps across multiple platforms harder than it has to be.
The app is almost entirely made up of tableviews/collection views/recycler views, save for the video player… really not rocket science. If YouTube’s public API were more capable I’m positive that third party devs would have no issue maintaining their YouTube apps across N platforms simply because they wouldn’t be overcomplicating them like Google is theirs.
Short answer - usually individual app developers, even of Google’s size, need the platform (iOS) more than the platform needs them. This means Apple has historically driven hard bargains with even the most popular apps. Now Apple is launching a new platform (visionOS) the 3 most popular in their categories - YouTube, Netflix and Spotify decided that visionOS needs them more than they need visionOS. For now.
It’s possible they might use this leverage to negotiate better terms on iOS. For example, Netflix would like to offer in app subscriptions and to keep more the revenue without sharing with Apple.
If Apple sells millions of visionOS devices then that gives Apple more leverage and these 3 might come crawling back.
Long answer - The Apple Vision Pro’s Missing Apps by Stratechery (https://stratechery.com/2024/the-apple-vision-pros-missing-a...)
That's just apple being apple though, shipping half baked stuff 3 years before they're ready
A example would be Windows phone where they just not only did not make a YouTube app they denied access to the YouTube app made by Microsoft.
That app literally broke YouTube's agreements with the music labels though (by allowing free downloads etc), which this one doesn't.
The YouTube app would have just worked on the vison pro if they hadn’t explicitly opted out.
Why do you say that?
I don't think the Youtube product managers really care enough about Vision Pro to prioritise making an app for it. That doesn't mean they strategically disgree with the product and actively wish to hamper it.
Indepedently of Vision Pro, I think they just might not be that enthusastic about third party youtube apps.
They explicitly opted the YouTube iPad app out of working on vision pro