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Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

Technology doesn't need to be "special" to be useful.

Nothing makes this special, maybe a well-known indie developer.

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.

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.

"There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat."

If you have a link to the other similar ones that would be useful.

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 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.

I'm 100% expecting YouTube to cease&desist him

> https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/171780?hl=en

The YouTube API Terms of Service and Developer Policies apply to all access and use of the YouTube embedded player.

> https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/developer-polici...

You and your API Clients must not, and must not encourage, enable, or require others to:

use YouTube API Services to create, offer, or act as a substitute for, or substantially similar service to, any YouTube Applications. API Clients must not mimic or replicate YouTube's core user experiences by recreating features or process flows unless they add significant independent value or functionality that improves users' interactions with YouTube. For example, an API Client must not recreate the browse experience from any YouTube Application without adding significant independent value to that flow.

I think it's a reasonable argument that because YouTube have deigned to not support this device with a first party app that they are indeed adding "significant independent value or functionality that improves users' interactions with YouTube" with this program?

Specifically this appears to offer a better experience than what YouTube choose to offer.

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.

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

> 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.

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 look away from it. The OS doesn’t give apps access to the eye tracking info.

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."

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.

>if/when YouTube cuts it off (can they really?)

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

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.

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...

Seems like a lot of the motivation was just recouping lost revenue from his existing YouTube player integration code.

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