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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting as a symbol of how times have changed because YouTube was one of the handful of built-in apps on the original iPhone, before the App Store.

(For some reason the iPhone YouTube app's icon was an image of a retro cream-and-brown 1940s TV. I guess Steve Jobs just liked that design because it certainly didn't have anything to do with YouTube's branding and didn't look like anything Google would have picked for any product.)

When Microsoft shipped the revamped Windows Phone a few years later, the "app gap" was one of the main problems. High-profile apps like YouTube never became available on the platform because by then Google was busy promoting their own mobile OS.

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> the "app gap" was one of the main problems. High-profile apps like YouTube never became available on the platform

There were great native third-party YouTube clients in the official Store on Windows Phone. On the contrary, I missed my Youtube client after I had to switch back to Android (until I found NewPipe).

The app gap was the generic bland comment about windows phone every writer put in their reviews/articles/tests. I didn't feel I was missing many apps with my lumia 640 and I don't think it's what solely derailed the platform but that mantra felt like death by a thousand same cuts.

It was as boring and stupid as reading "yeah that igpu is fine but not for gaming of course unless you restrict yourself to 2d or indie games" is.

With Safari, and Safari’s ability to run sites like apps (assuming this will make it to VisionOS), I don’t see this as that big of an issue. Not like it was for Windows phone.

Spotify isn’t something that should need a dedicated app to play music in the background, it could run in the browser just fine. I think the same Is true for YouTube. It may not have VisionOS specific features, but watching videos shouldn’t be a problem.

I removed the YouTube app from my phone a few months ago, because I thought I was using it too much. I still load it up in the browser all the time and it works fine. I don’t have background audio anymore, but that should not be an issue on VisionOS, and is a premium phone feature that most users don’t have.

> With Safari, and Safari’s ability to run sites like apps (assuming this will make it to VisionOS), I don’t see this as that big of an issue. Not like it was for Windows phone.

It's not like Windows Phone didn't have a browser too (IE). And it's not like Apple aren't the ones making sure Safari doesn't support everything for Progressive Web Apps which could have come handy here.

> Spotify isn’t something that should need a dedicated app to play music in the background, it could run in the browser just fine.

Maybe. Would it work if your browser is on the background while you're reading something from another app on the Vision Pro?

> Would [Spotify] work if your browser is on the background while you're reading something from another app

Not sure about Spotify, but the only thing that stops YouTube’s mobile website from working in the background is its own code. On Android, with the Firefox addon disabling the Page Visibility API for it, it plays perfectly in the background.

Only time will tell. From what we’ve seen so far, VisionOS seems more like macOS, where a user will be multitasking across multiple applications in front of them at once. I’d be shocked if a user can’t watch a video or listen to music in one window, while doing something else in another. It would be DOA without that basic function.

> With Safari, and Safari’s ability to run sites like apps (assuming this will make it to VisionOS), I don’t see this as that big of an issue.

I do see a big issue: not having the ability to use Netflix' and YouTube's (app only) download feature, to allow you to watch videos offline (on a plane for instance).

Back to pirating.

> With Safari, and Safari’s ability to run sites like apps (assuming this will make it to VisionOS), I don’t see this as that big of an issue. Not like it was for Windows phone.

That’s exactly what Windows Phone strategy was. And web browsers still can’t run websites like apps no matter what the PWA advocates say.

Things have changed a lot since Windows Phone. Electron has become huge for desktop applications, and many mobile apps are simply wrappers for a web app. The apps we’re talking about in this case aren’t very resource intensive, and both have very capable web experiences.

> Electron has become huge for desktop applications

Electron isn't the same as PWA and runs in Chrome for starters and also has an underbelly you can control and extend with native code. Apple intentionally limits Safari's multimedia capabilities to push you towards making apps.

the microsoft phone missed an incredible opportunity to undercut the established platforms by both supporting native (windows) apps, but also encourage web based mobile "apps" (this was the era that pwa would've been able to take root). Unfortunately, microsoft thought they would get enough native clout to own a platform instead of giving in to a standard.

You wouldn't be saying this if you had used the absolutely pathetic browser they shipped with Windows Phone. They even called it "Internet Explorer", that's how blind they were to brand damage done by IE6.

Mobile web apps were pretty janky until 2016 or so, and the last Windows Phone came out in 2014.

Wasn't that design partly because early iOS was driven by "skeuomorphic design"? So thinking in terms of that "YouTube" would remind people of "the tubes" AKA usually another word to describe a TV.

I'm probably wrong though.

> I guess Steve Jobs just liked that design

Think he looked at the home screen like ad space and didn't want the YT logo on all the iPhone marketing and being the first thing people see when they unlock it every time.

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