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I’m curious if YouTube tracks the phone angle/motion through the gyroscope. I swear I always get the hour-long ads when my phone is not in my hand, and I’m not able to skip it immediately.

I doubt they actually do that, but I’m sure it would increase ad view times. Im probably just only remembering the ads I don’t immediately skip.

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Activity Recognition API has states ON_FOOT and STILL [0]. They can probably register to handle ON_FOOT-->STILL and wait for N minutes without touching.

This also reminds me of the Idle Detection API they tried adding in Chrome. [1]

[0] https://developers.google.com/android/reference/com/google/a...

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/capabilities/web-apis/idle...

My anecdote is the opposite: I never get the hour long ads when my tablet is sitting there, only when I'm holding it. I always thought they knew the long adds were playing to an empty room, holding my place in the video till I came back to skip, and YT was deliberately trying to coax me back to watch with short ads.

I also let the hour long ads play when I'm holding my phone (just to mess with the algorithm) so maybe that is just my experience.

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