Juno for YouTube has been removed from the App Store | Hacker News Reader

Juno for YouTube has been removed from the App Store

christianselig.com

184 pointsMaximilianEmel140 comments

This is the same developer whose Apollo app got screwed by Reddit. They seem to have a talent for finding simple ways to improve things in new contexts. Unfortunately, their improvements are typically of benefit to _actual users_, and the services in question would rather treat users as grist for the mill.

It’s unjust, and I believe it’s short-sighted.

A similar sequence of events happened to Jase Morrissey, who developed Alien Blue for Reddit in 2010, although in that case Reddit was more gracious and acquired the app in before killing it in favor of their own: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Blue

He then made Jasmine, a YouTube client which was an order of magnitude better than the official YouTube app...which was then killed for the same reasons as Juno.

I am sensing a pattern.

The history of Apple store abuse goes back far as well. For their own gain and others.

The pattern is that companies make APIs so they can control things. (never at the start)

Web scraping types of apps are more democratic.

Funny enough, still have alienblue on my phone and still use. The app still works and everything.

Tech's really shifted from the days where an idea like Juno would get your app acquired, and possibly get you hired under their wing to help improve the base product. That's when you can really tell the hacker mentality left big tech.

When the zero interest rates left, at least.

And Lina Kahn came in

Are you suggesting Lina is on the side of big Tech?

He's suggesting that acquisitions aren't happening because of antitrust enforcement. I'm pretty sure that has no bearing on the type of tiny acquisition we're talking about here but then again I don't actually know what I'm talking about.

May I recommend watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWcoZVSx1T8, by Thomas Laffont who runs an investment fund.

The FTC is blocking acquisitions, which is one major exit strategy for startups.

It’s been said before on here that the MBAs have won in big tech and I think that’s fair.

This sort of tribalism is utterly insufferable. “The good decisions? They were us! And the bad ones? They were made by those idiots over there!”

Calm down, Google.

It left big tech when software stores got introduced and systems got locked down in the name of "security".

These stores are quite different to software repositories and it left use with disabled operating systems for mobile devices.

I still don't understand the Apollo collapse. The creator seemed to have convinced themselves that their users would not be willing to pay to continue using the app - despite the outpouring of love Apollo enjoyed. It all seemed very short sighted and emotional.

When things turn sour, sometimes you have to see the writing on the wall and think years in the future. It may not be something you signed up for.

There is also a limit to which people are willing to put themselves through.

Ok, but it was inevitable Reddit wouldn't offer free services to businesses making profit off of their content forever. The creator must have wondered at some point how long the free gravy was going to continue flowing? Why no exit plan of any kind, or even an attempt?

I never understood why Reddit couldn’t just have kept the API free, and embedded ads in the feed directly. They would get their ad revenue, and third party developers would actually help them make money.

Probably because it would be easy to filter those ads from the feeds.

The facts were businesses like Apollo built themselves upon Reddit's value-proposition. The content is what the users wanted - and Reddit had the content. Apollo's value-add was making that content more accessible to users - at Reddit's expense.

We can debate how Reddit handled the rollout - but the facts are businesses like Apollo offered little to Reddit in exchange for Reddit's content.

People operating businesses based on someone else's data (moat) should have an exit plan for when the free ride ends.

From a legal point-of-view, yes, Reddit had control of the data and chose to alter the deal. And the app developer did have an exit plan: shutting down the app and refunding subscribers. The developer appears to have weighed his options, considered the strategy Reddit was communicating with the rollout of their API changes, and concluded that this was no longer a viable market.

Many people expressed strong opinions about what the developer should do, but he appears to have remained calm and rational throughout the experience, and chose to walk away when it made sense.

However:

> The content is what the users wanted - and Reddit had the content...

> ...in exchange for Reddit's content...

> ...operating businesses based on someone else's data (moat)...

Let's not fool ourselves: the data was created by and for the users, and it never belonged to Reddit in any moral sense. It's a regrettable externality of our legal framework that Reddit was able to withdraw their free API and prevent the community from accessing its own data how it saw fit.

In no way can we consider the content on reddit to be owned by the users.

By using reddit and posting, you agree to their terms - the content belongs to them.

It's unreasonable to believe Reddit should continue offering free services to businesses that were making money off of Reddit's content.

From the Reddit TOS:

> 5. Your Content

> The Services may contain information, text, links, graphics, photos, videos, audio, streams, software, tools, or other materials (“Content”), including Content created with or submitted to the Services by you or through your Account (“Your Content”). We take no responsibility for and we do not expressly or implicitly endorse, support, or guarantee the completeness, truthfulness, accuracy, or reliability of any of Your Content.

> By submitting Your Content to the Services, you represent and warrant that you have all rights, power, and authority necessary to grant the rights to Your Content contained within these Terms. Because you alone are responsible for Your Content, you may expose yourself to liability if you post or share Content without all necessary rights.

> You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:

https://redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement-september-25-2...

Twice you have deliberately left out literally the most important bit. I'll quote it for you:

> When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.

It's theirs the moment you click post - and there's nothing you can do about it.

That does not equal legal ownership.

> respect to Your Content

I don't know if you added the capitalization or not. If not I think it was precisely written like this to drive that point home.

The content wasn't Reddit's, it was simply hosted on Reddit. It was actually owned by the users, many of whom were using apps to benefit Reddit via additional content and moderation.

Someone didn't read the TOS.

From the TOS:

> 5. Your Content

> You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:

https://redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement-september-25-2...

> but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content

The most important bits you left out. You grant them a license to do anything they want with the data, including sell, use, etc. ie. it's theirs now.

I have actually. The way it's always worked for Reddit (and social media in general) is that you provide them a license to do things with the content, but the site doesn't take ownership of the content. This isn't a meaningless distinction either. It's a key part of Reddit's legal shield from all the illegal content they unknowingly host, via things like section 230.

> it was inevitable Reddit wouldn't offer free services to businesses making profit off of their content forever

Their content. The audacity. Reddit is built on users' content and on free moderation. Sure it was inevitable that Reddit would lock things down for profit. But lets not pretend that this is Reddit's content.

For the 3rd time you are entirely incorrect. I won't quote the TOS again for you, as I have done twice already.

The moment you post to reddit, they can do anything they want with the content. It is now theirs.

It's also naïve to say reddit was built upon users' content. Yes the content is the most important bit and the reasons users are there today - but that ignores all of the software and infrastructure that made it all possible. There's a reason reddit is what it is today, and it was not an accident.

For users TOS are entirely irrelevant on the internet anyway.

Of course it is their decision to not embrace users in the end.

> The moment you post to reddit, they can do anything they want with the content. It is now theirs.

This is patently false. The content is not theirs, users grant Reddit a license to their content. See the TOS [1] you spoke of:

> You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:

This isn't just some bit of semantics either. If you can contact the users, you could request a license for the content yourself. So really the only bastion Reddit has is technical measures for preventing scraping, since publicly accessible data is allowed to be scraped in the US due to legal precedent. That is, nothing in the TOS prevents other parties from displaying the data in other formats (as long as they don't use the API). The thing is, all the apps did make use of the API because they were not adversarial with Reddit, as opposed to webapps like libreddit that circumvent the API altogether.

[1]: https://redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement

Apollo had a yearly subscription while switching over to the new Reddit API structure would require a monthly fee. That puts you in a spot where you may have users that are still on a yearly plan and not paying in while incurring massive monthly API costs. It was the sudden short notice of API costs increases that caused the whole thing to collapse

"One option many have suggested is to simply increase the price of Apollo to offset costs. The issue here is that Apollo has approximately 50,000 yearly subscribers at the moment. On average they paid $10/year many months ago, a price I chose based on operating costs I had at the time (server fees, icon design, having a part-time server engineer). Those users are owed service as they already prepaid for a year, but starting July 1st will (in the best case scenario) cost an additional $1/month each in Reddit fees. That's $50,000 in sudden monthly fee that will start incurring in 30 days.

So you see, even if I increase the price for new subscribers, I still have those many users to contend with. If I wait until their subscription expires, slowly month after month there will be less of them. First month $50,000, second month maybe $45,000, then $40,000, etc. until everything has expired, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. It would be cheaper to simply refund users."

From: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...

Refund at a pro-rated rate, be frank with users and tell them the situation and why you have to raise prices - then raise prices.

I doubt users would have revolted had the subscription gone up to $19.95 or even $29.95 a year. Heck, my hiking app is more than that annually, and I barely use it.

I remain convinced Apollo had options, but the creator was convinced it was an impossible situation. It was not. There was an outpouring of support and people willing to spend money on an app they saw immense personal value in.

> Refund at a pro-rated rate, be frank with users and tell them the situation and why you have to raise prices - then raise prices.

I don't think the app store provides a mechanism to do this.

So refund in full and do the rest? That's what happened anyway, isn't it (the refund)?

The point was there were options, but the creator didn't seek them. So many people wanted that app to continue living - I find it impossible to believe the creator couldn't get an extra $1 a month (or even a lot more!) from those users.

How many apps can boast they have 50,000 paying customers? People need to appreciate just how difficult of an accomplishment that already is. The paying users loved the app, and would have paid more to continue using it - especially in light of the available information at the time.

A massive proportion of us didn't request a refund. I don't know the percentage, but I would not be surprised is most users didn't ask for a refund of $10.

You're probably right that there was some way for Christian to navigate this and keep Apollo up. But I also don't blame him one bit for throwing his hands up after how that whole API debacle went down. Must've been pretty stressful.

I believe Apollo was open sourced after it's demise. You could run it yourself but then you'd have to contend with the intentionally difficulty of installing software on the iphone.

> I doubt users would have revolted had the subscription gone up

I don't doubt this, actually. I was a user of Apollo. I purchased the Pro Unlock for $5, and I did this only because it was a 1 time purchase. If it were a $5/mo subscription, I would have never used the app. Sure, I'm just one person and maybe many others don't feel the same way, but I have a hunch many do. Especially with the amount of subscriptions flying around these days, many people are getting frustrated by constantly having to subscribe.

Even if 80% of users stopped using Apollo, the rest could have still been sustainable and/or profitable.

50,000 paying users. That's incredible. Apollo could have even gotten loans to cover the interim if needed. There were many options to continue forward. The creator took none of them.

My guess is the creator was emotionally exhausted by the ordeal and was not in the head-space to deal with such a disruptive change. Unfortunately, brilliant creators/engineers are not always the best suited to operate the business, especially during troubled times.

Reddit designed this pricing change specifically to kill off 3rd party apps. If Apollo jumped through this hoop, there would be another in the future. There wouldn't be any winning this game.

Maybe, maybe not. It's unreasonable to expect a company to offer free services that make you money. Therefore it's not unreasonable to pay something for access to the content that makes your app successful.

No matter what the API fees are - if Apollo provided value to it's users, it would have users willing to pay for it. Like I previously said - many apps cost $30-50+ annually to use - and the users are happy to pay. Apollo users probably on-average used the app daily.

Are there any 3rd party apps that did not come to the same conclusion that the fees and restrictions made their continued development untenable?

Narwhal transitioned to a 3rd party, paid subscription app. It's been around for over a year in this form.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/29/23777992/reddit-third-par...

I'm pretty sure even the paid Reddit API had some ridiculous stipulations, like you couldn't view NSFW content.

As recently as a few months ago you could see NSFW content in Narwhal 2 on iOS. Not sure if it has since changed.

I do remember hearing they were planning that change, though.

NSFW is not available via API.

It was so well-loved that someone cloned it for the fediverse version of Reddit: Voyager for Lemmy is a near-clone of Apollo for Reddit, but using web technology.

I have now moved my Reddit usage fully to Lemmy because the official app was just such a pain to use.

Platforms exist for the benefit of platforms, not users.

"short-sighted" is a euphemism used a lot to describe company behavior. We should just call it what it is, anti-social greed.

I think focusing on the timeline is correct though. There is such a thing as pro-social greed, which is to say: a desire for a product/service/company to be long lived through sustainability of their business model. The problem, I think, stems largely from “shareholder value” theories which force executives to operate solely on a quarterly mindset. When all low hanging fruit in a market has been harvested, those held accountable for value extraction are pushed into short term, unsustainable tactics so that every quarter key metrics can go up regardless of the underlying reality. Hence: layoffs and enshittification.

I find it funny that at the time of this comment this Submission and this one.

>Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms (2021)

Are both on the top 10 of the frontpage of HN.

Also thx for apollo but it wouldn't have mattered if it stayed active since reddit has plummeted in usefulness since the time of its removal anyway. I don't see reddits direction changing ever at this point.

I haven't read that article yet. But it has become extremely hard not to build in someone else's kingdom. Just ask Facebook or Uber or various other unicorns.

And now our own phones are "someone else's kingdom". The corporate noose gets tighter by the day.

They've already pulled the lever, the neck just hasn't snapped yet.

Oh, man, Christian, are you going to do Discord next? Because it’d fit the pattern to a T.

(This is a joke)

I was a huge fan of Apollo and genuinely appreciate your UX design and aesthetic chops. Please make something 100% your own next time! You have the name recognition and development experience to pull it off.

I can’t wait to see what you do next. Just… please not another client for someone else’s service.

A 15 year old bully reaches out to the other 15 year old bully and decide to take the lunch of a 4 year old kid.

I mean I don't think Apple wanted to do this, it was a great value add for Vision Pro. I'm pretty sure Apple has directly promoted Juno, I thought I remember seeing it in an Apple live event? Apollo certainly was - Craig Federighi mentioned it by name shortly before Reddit killed it.

Let's not pretend Apple hasn't become a bully.

I respect Jobs, his brilliance and legacy. But Apple has never been farther away from what he stood for when he started it.

I'm surprised that this app was actually allowed and approved in the first place.

Apple has an App Store rule against allowing apps or wrappers using an API or third party content without the express permission of the content owner.

Juno was likely given a pass by Apple due to the dearth of native Vision Pro video players. For instance, both YouTube and Netflix didn't have native apps available.

Perhaps Apple was a bit more lenient on Juno initially as it provided their own platform with some credibility at a critical launch stage.

You don’t need explicit specific permission. You just can’t backdoor an API. A public facing API is enough, and why so many Reddit apps used to exist.

The guideline is:

5.2.2 Third-Party Sites/Services: If your app uses, accesses, monetizes access to, or displays content from a third-party service, ensure that you are specifically permitted to do so under the service’s terms of use. Authorization must be provided upon request.

So, reading from the above, if Apple thinks you are doing the dodgy then they may request specific authorization proof from you which shows that the third party is ok with what you are doing. If you can't provide it, then they will likely not approve your app submission.

Yes, if the site doesn’t have a public API, then you might have to prove specific authorization.

But if a site does, like YouTube allows for embeds, then it falls under the “services terms of use”

This highlights the reason why side-loading should be a right for users on the device they bought. Users get to control what gets installed on the device.

Yattee will always work because it's using Invidious or Piped as a backend that you can even self-host

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yattee/id1595136629

https://github.com/yattee/yattee

https://old.reddit.com/r/Yattee/comments/13d3lj7/how_to_set_...

Invidious is in a precarious position right now: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/4734#issuecomment...

Yep. The Kodi/LibreElec client stopped working some days ago. FreeTube (and NewPipe on mobile) still rock, but for how long?

I don't get it: this seems to be an issue where YouTube is blocking 3rd-party client access from datacenter IPs. Why would you want to do that in the first place? Wouldn't you normally run a YouTube client from home (or wherever you happen to be at the moment, which for most people isn't a datacenter)?

FWIW, SmartTube works just fine for me. Of course, I'm running it on my TV at home, not in a datacenter...

The YouTube client forces users to identify themselves by creating personalized API keys.

This is one of many reasons why we need alternative app stores.

The floodgates is slowly stating to crack, fortunately. But it'll still be some years before the US wisens up to what the EU has been doing for the past few years.

Christian, you really don't get a break do you :( Thanks for the great apps you have made.

First Reddit now YouTube. Christian is a talented developer, but his efforts are wasted building applications for closed social media.

Christian, if you are reading this...maybe a nice HN app as the next fun project?

Hack (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hack-for-yc-hacker-news-reader...) is absolutely amazing, but competition is always a good thing.

Alternatively, creating a good Fediverse (aka Mastodon) client would also be great!

I use Harmonic on android for HN and can highly recommend it

The website is perfectly functional on mobile though. And fast. And the data is the latest.

Vote buttons are too small. "Perfectly functional" for mobile app to me means input methods that can be reached consistently with little effort, like swiping to vote.

At least the buttons scale with the text size, and so to an limited extent this is within your control.

Who could've imagined that you don't need 150MB of JavaScript to create an easily usable mobile UI?

Ice Cubes is OSS and it’s amazing. Alternatively, I hear that Ivory rocks too.

Octal is another great ios app

And for the Android users out there, I highly recommend Glider: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nl.viter.glide...

there are like 12 of those already.

But most of them look like they were designed by a developer. Apollo & Juno are both well designed apps.

That will not bring him significant income.

It was an app for the Vision Pro for $5. I’m pretty sure that’s not a big money maker either.

This less an iOS App Store dispute so much as a YouTube dispute. Selig's post makes it clear there was a process, started by YouTube, that took time, and the disagreement wasn't resolved between them.

I'm going to quote here so what happened is part of the commenting narrative:

For those not aware, a few months ago after reaching out to me, YouTube contacted the App Store stating that Juno does not adhere to YouTube guidelines and modifies the website in a way they don’t approve of, and alludes to their trademarks and iconography.

I don’t agree ... Juno is just a web view ... that modifies CSS to make the website and video player look more “visionOS” like... Juno also doesn’t block ads in any capacity...

I stated as much to YouTube, they wouldn’t really clarify or budge any, and as a result of both parties not being able to come to a conclusion I received an email a few minutes ago from Apple that Juno has been removed from the App Store.

It's worth noting that the YouTubes of the world get self-hosters to take things down too.

This is an App Store dispute. My Android phone, with Google's own Play Services installed, does absolutely nothing to prevent me from sideloading third-party binaries that offer YouTube playback (I use NewPipe). Without sideloading, Apple's primary App Store becomes a juicy target for anyone that wants to enforce broad-stroke censorship. All you need is the legal authority (fuck moral superiority!) and Apple will enforce the censorship for you. It's easy: https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-complies-with-russian-censo...

If a sideloading mechanism existed on iOS, Google would have no authority to demand third-parties to stop. It is only because Apple is afraid of the legal repercussions that their users are deprived of third-party clients. The sole first-party mechanism for distributing apps was threatened into silence.

A shame too, since AdBlock and free background playback is just soooo nice. But who am I to complain, I'm not the one buying phones that cuck my freedom as a user. The solution is for me to know, and for you to rationalize as a defense of Apple's business practices until the cognitive dissonance drives you insane.

Hope you like Google's first-party YouTube app!

I don't know iOS enough, but, is there no other way to provide this other than the app store? (e.g. like you can enable "untrusted" apk installs in Android?)

i.e., while there's surely fat less visibility outside of the app store, is it not even possible to install such an app offerred in a different way?

(especially given the wording that it is, in effect, a browser extension)

along similar notes, is there a market for an alternative browser that is just extensible enough that you could effectively program useful apps on it and bypass such walled garden BS ... and does chrome/firefox not already provide that?

> is there no other way to provide this other than the app store?

You can provide an .IPA file for the app, but users won't be able to use it like a normal app and have to pay $99/year for the privilege to sideload properly. There isn't an alternative in the same way Android provides, unfortunately - hopefully legislation can force Apple's hand there.

> along similar notes, is there a market for an alternative browser that is just extensible enough that you could effectively program useful apps on it and bypass such walled garden BS

Hahaha... maybe, but only if you're a European iPhone owner: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/25/24050478/apple-ios-17-4-b...

This will continue to happen as long as the incentives of the platform are misaligned with the incentives of the user.

For ad-supported sites, the customer is the advertiser, not the viewer. The site will optimize the experience for the customer. 3rd party apps simply don't provide a way to control ad delivery, so there's an incentive for the platform to shut them down.

It's why I've been pushing for/working on a paid social sharing site, since at that point the customer is the user. It means the incentives are aligned, and 3rd party apps are a boon not an anathema.

I love my MacBook, but this kind of App Store nonsense is exactly why you won't find me using any other Apple products. At least with MacOS I can install whatever software I want without Apple's approval, and I can write Mac OS programs and Apple doesn't get to decide if my users are allowed to run them on their machines.

But iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and visionOS are awful wall-garden hellscapes that force me to use Apple's store, or pound sand. This is a great example where a developer created a useful app in good faith, following all of the rules laid out by YouTube and Apple, and because Google didn't like it (despite it not breaking any rules or laws), the project has been killed with no recourse for the developer or the users. There's no alternative option to acquire this app, it's Apple's way, or the highway.

Let me write the software I want to write, and use the software I want to use, and get the hell out of my way.

Why not implement Juno as a userscript?

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/userscripts/id1463298887 is supposedly compatible with Apple Vision.

Put the code on GitHub and make it open. It’s a shame, and yet you can ensure it a I’ll get used

Maybe not github and someplace that doesn't remove repos at corps' whims.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41711709

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/youtube-dl-re...

https://reclaimthenet.org/crunchyroll-downloaded-github-copy...

https://techdator.net/github-removed-mediabox-hd-for-streami...

and so on

github is fine to start with imo, that's what forks are for (proper forks).

Bah! Humbug!

I use this all the time. Thanks for making it.

The risks of a derivative business.

Derivative of Apple, or Google? Given the circumstances of App Store removal only, I don't know if it's very clear.

What does this app do?

Put YouTube's website in a slightly-modified web view.

There currently is no YouTube app for visionOS. If you want to watch YouTube you have to open a web browser with all the restrictions and incompatibilities Apple does to the web. Juno makes that mildly more convenient.

release the code then

Probably the same will happen to Reeder.

Fuck you YouTube to make a worse UI & UX.

Time for Selig to build some original ideas instead of yet another wrapper around a popular service.

Is this for Apple's VR thingy?

I take it this is for Apple's app store and Apple removed it.

I thought Youtube removed it from Play store or something, so Apple is the bad guy here.

It’s made pretty clear by the post that YouTube is to blame. Considering the poor developer adoption of the Vision Pro, I very much doubt Apple is happy about losing a popular app.

No one forced Apple to remove it. Google just asked and Apple happily complied. By all accounts, the app didn't break any laws or even any TOS.

> happily

Citation needed.

Look, I’m not defending Apple here, I have my fair share of gripes with them (especially under Tim Cook), but let’s not assume to know what went into this decision. If YouTube is throwing copyright law and other shit at you, even if you think they’re wrong it’s probably not worth it (in terms of cost and broken relationships) to fight it. For all we know they could’ve threatened to removed the official app on iOS, which will undoubtedly have more users.

Armchair criticism is easy.

Apple really dug their own grave with the "zero sideloading" policy here, huh?

That is a bad policy, yes. It’s also orthogonal to the matter.

That's funny, my sideloaded YouTube app on Android hasn't had any requests from Google to get removed from F-Droid. Must be... Google, targeting Apple users!

I honestly have no idea what you’re on about. Whatever you’re arguing for doesn’t seem to be the matter being discussed. I have no interest in flamewars.

Alright. =)

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