YouTube in Android introduces UI bugs | Hacker News Reader

YouTube in Android introduces UI bugs

play.google.com

22 pointssamanator33 comments

The UI issues I've noticed aren't really bugs as much as they're intentional UI changes that happen to be poorly thought out. I'm used to Google randomly changing the UI for seemingly no benefit, but these changes are especially egregious considering how much of my youtube interaction is muscle memory.

For example, you used to be able to double tap just about anywhere on the screen to fast forward or rewind 10 seconds. Now on the first tap the bottom half of the screen becomes an overlay with a bunch of action buttons, causing the second tap to inadvertently engage one of the buttons.

>Now on the first tap the bottom half of the screen becomes an overlay with a bunch of action buttons, causing the second tap to inadvertently engage one of the buttons.

Thank you for saying this. I thought I was going crazy as I suddenly started to skip to the next video when I just want to forward it. I'm still not sure if this is an intentional change or a bug

Youtube is pretty much a monopoly at this point. It has no significant competition. So they can afford to have plenty of bugs and indeed their fight against general purpose computation and preventing people from watching youtube outside of their prescribed web applications and smartphone apps has lead to the introduction of many bugs even in the browser.

I used to use youtube in a browser because it just worked. It had lots of nice features compared to youtube-dl/yt-dlp. But since they've worked so hard to prevent the use of such tools even my browser based youtube is regularly freezing the video for ~5-10 second periods many times during a play now (on multiple computers/firefox, via multiple IPs).

Youtube tightening their grip has made the youtube.com website so bad that yt-dlp is now actually a better experience. Rather than just an awkward way to preserve things.

This is why I have auto update turned off. It sucks but it's the only way to ensure that you continue to have a good experience with apps. I had an issue for several months while watching youtube fullscreen I'd do some gesture/interaction and suddenly it would be locked whole screen and I couldn't exit, switch apps or do anything. Only a reboot would solve it. No other apps had this issue. I finally tried an update and it's far less frequent. There is no way in heck am I upgrading again until absolutely forced.

I recommend ReVanced if you're going to use YouTube on Android device.

https://revanced.app/

This should also leave you on a slightly older version of the app, too, which might bypass any recent issues with updates. But, it has a ton of useful builtin features, like bring-back-dislikes and sponsorblock.

And ad blocking!

Bold of you to risk your Google account by accessing it through a patched client... No amount of complaining on HN will bring it back when Google decides to banhammer all people who break their TOS in such a stupid way.

YouTube no longer has a monopoly on internet video distribution. If you notice, all the major platforms now have good support for direct posting of videos.

Further, it's now easier than ever to decouple one's online life from google and so anyone not doing so is taking unnecessary risk.

TLDR: its you own problem if you Google account become permabanned.

Or you could just use a burner account and avoid this.

1. Why would you ever login to youtube in the first place?

2. There's strength in numbers. Between adblockers, foss clients, and youtube-dl/yt-dlp, there are probably tens to hundreds of millions of people watching youtube this way. If YT banhammers everyone for that they would end up banning a sizable fraction of the earth's population all in one day. Even Google isn't stupid enough to do that.

Why would you bother to use or even more so patch the official youtube client if not to sign in to your account? It's objectively shitter (bloated, buggy, full of dark patterns) than the open-source alternatives. NewPipe/PipePipe work beautifully without an associated account...

To watch NSFW videos?

I already downloaded copies of all of the data I care about, and keep as much stuff as possible completely disconnected from my personal Google account. I'm also a Xoogler that is completely aware that Googlers use these things too (including youtube-dl, lol.)

I guess it is good to keep people aware of the possibility, but I do also want as many people as possible to join in. If they want to ban all of us, that's fine by me. Sincerely.

NewPipe [1] and its derivatives like Tubular that include SponsorBlock (and dislikes, but I don't use this feature) are also great.

They let you follow channels and build playlists without a Google account and play stuff in background.

You can find those apps on F-Droid by adding the relevant repositories.

[1] https://newpipe.net/

[2] https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular

Grayjay is also excellent.

https://grayjay.app/

and SmartTube (https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube) if you have an Android TV.

Revanced is not bad with Sponsorblock + hiding shorts. Haven't tried but I don't see why it couldn't be used without logging in.

I do appreciate NewPipe for helping cut down on YT feed scrolling and just focusing on subscriptions. For a while I'd completely migrated to NewPipeSponsorblock but that fork became unmaintained and at the time there didn't seem to be an alternative.

I'm a Premium subscriber but am seriously considering stopping that in favor of Revanced or Newpipe. Presumably they both let me disable shorts permanently versus bullshit like only being able to hide them for thirty days?

Revanced enables completely hiding shorts.

What's crazy is I'm using Revanced with a Premium account. I'm more than happy to pay for YouTube even as much as I don't love Google, but I'm still going to opt for the vastly better experience if I have the option.

As far as I know, you can indeed disable Shorts in ReVanced. The defaults in ReVanced may need some tweaking to your liking, but there's quite a lot of options.

Just use Firefox.

On desktop I do! (Though I use the Librewolf patches rather than vanilla.) But you can't use background video playback on mobile devices without the app (to my knowledge) and I don't think picture in picture works, either. Plus, I generally recommend Fennec F-Droid on Android rather than the stupid shitty version of Firefox that compromised Mozilla puts out these days.

I've noticed minor UI bugs on iOS as well. When you skip an ad playing in landscape mode it will restore the video stream into the upper left corner. You need to leave and re-enter fullscreen to fix it. Not the worst bug but it's been around for a few weeks and is a surprising issue for such a common event on a major platform from one of the world's richest companies.

The last year-ish on Android has been a steady progression of UX bug after UX bug. It's bizarre to the point of convincing me that those with decision making authority clearly do not use their own app.

I thought it was only me, but when I went to update the app I saw that the most recent reviews all describe serious UI bugs and have thousands of likes.

https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe

I just wish they hadn't killed Invidious :(

There seems to be no way anymore to keep a public instance working.

I don't understand this, NewPipe has continued to work.

NewPipe has it's own library NewPipeExtractor and does the work on your device, so IP bans aren't really a problem compared to a hosted instances where multiple clients access youtube through the IP of the instance. https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor

Piped is an alternative to Invidious which uses the NewPipeExtractor library: https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped

But instances with high traffic or 'suspicious IP Adresses' can still be banned very quickly.

This is why I only watch Youtube via Firefox mobile, plus I can use a adblocker with that.

Google is garbage at this point. Every employee there is simply promotion farming and has no concept of what a backbone is. Everything they do is utter trash and only about feeding their algorithm or collecting your data.

Why is this a link to the play store? what are you trying to show us here OP?

The two top comments since the November 7th updatee have thousands of upvotes because of affected users. Comments:

ThSAWistheLAW WC (11/7/24) "I like this app but it is not functioning correctly at the moment. If your video that you're viewing must be interrupted by a message notification or if you simply turn your phone right side up to read the messages or comments the video will stop playing and it will not start no matter how many times you hit the play button. Other than that it's a fine app."

---

michael. jacqui (11/8/24) "New update is awful. It no longer saves where you left off on a video. If you swipe down and leave the video going to search for a new one it automatically paused the video. When you go back to play the video it cannot play unless you select a new video and then have to reselect the video you want to watch to get it to play. The app is horrible and extremely frustrating."

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