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Comment by atombender | Hacker News Reader

The YouTube app is easily the worst app on Apple TV.

For example, if you pause the video by clicking the main action button brings up an overlay that takes up almost the whole screen, so you can no longer see the content in case you paused to freeze the frame. How do you start it again? By clicking the same button, right? No! By clicking up. For some reason up means back and down means to open some additional UI with related videos and what not.

No other app is like this — Plex, Infuse, Apple, Netflix etc. abide by relatively sane UI controls where the action button pauses and unpauses, and up/down don't scroll between weird overlay elements.

The YouTube filled with these incredible non-unintuitive UX choices that drive me crazy. I never use it unless I have a clear idea of something I want to watch.

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Apple TV apps, in general, are terrible. Every single one [that I routinely use] (including Apple’s apps) regularly crash or lock up, often leaving it to me, to force-quit.

Amazon has started getting into a state, lately, where it ignores the remote, unless I go back, then go forward again.

This kind of “quality” is considered “acceptable,” in today’s world.

AppleTV has a JavaScript-based development system. It also has a fairly classic native Swift system (which I use). I suspect most apps are JavaScript, though.

[EDIT: Added the “routinely use” qualifier]

The odd thing is, they seem to be getting progressively _worse_. The Netflix one was way better when the first ‘modern’ (app-y) appletv came out, say. Even the YouTube one used to be basically _fine_.

This is one of the most painful things about the modern corporate web. Why does everything _have_ to get worse? Just why? Fucking up the basic functionality of your central app just cannot be a profit driven decision but it seems like literally every single giant corporation is constantly moving towards destroying their own systems. I just don't understand. Even windows is destroying itself. I simply cannot remember the last time i got an "update" for any single thing and it got better. Why is this happening?

Noone wants to accept being feature complete even if they actually were feature complete years ago

Large corporations have the reigns of power seized by the political class: MBAs, sales executives, and CEOs that have never stepped foot in a workshop or factory in their entire lives… or even a shopping center, for that matter.

These people care only about each other: power, influence, money, etc.

Actually using or - gasp - improving the product is beneath them.

Or do you seriously think the billionaire CEO of some white goods company knows or cares about the quality of the wash the cheap Chinese-made washing machine does? He’s got staff laundering his clothes!

Similarly it’s very clear nobody with real power at Microsoft uses their own tools. I see their seniour product managers turn up to Microsoft Ignite with Apple Macs, for crying out loud!

That might be something wrong with your particular device - we've had two Apple TVs over 10+ years and they've been remarkably stable. I didn't even know how to "force quit" - I looked it up when you mentioned it.

Edit: Did have one problem where the centre channel would occasionally drop out - this would go away if you changed the volume and didn't happen that often so wasn't a big deal. I had assumed it was a problem with the Denon receiver we use but when we replaced our original Apple TV earlier this year wit a 4K model it stopped so must have been something to do with the device.

I have zero experience with these, but every app crashing could also indicate a hardware issue. Faulty memory perhaps?

I have two sets (one is a 4K, and the other, a regular set). It happens on both. The crashes are different, though, for each app. Usually, it’s the app falling into a fugue state, at some point, as I am channel-surfing (I do that, a lot).

I should also qualify that it’s not really “every single one” (that’s hyperbole). It’s the ones that I routinely use (Apple, Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix).

I’ll probably get another one, sooner or later, but I’ve been waiting for them to release a new version[0],

[0] https://share.google/YL2EBlQfewN9CGDxD

Interestingly enough the same happens on both Spotify's desktop and Chromecast / Apple TV application when you "song surf".

If you rapidly keep skipping through a song, then to the next one and repeat, the performance will keep on tanking. After a while it'll take 5-10 seconds just to load a song, going to other UI sections will take 3-5 seconds to load, and eventually the application completely locks up and soft reboots itself.

Probably JavaScript garbage collectors getting overwhelmed.

Javascript garbage collector wouldn't take so long... probably it's launching a new thread or process (for example, DRM decryption) for every song, and there becomes too many of them. Or it runs out of memory and starts swapping.

> I have zero experience with these

Then please realise your advice is completely unneeded and unhelpful.

That is not my experience. It’s extremely rare for me to ever need to kill an app.

Same. I’ve only had to do it with the YouTube app, which does suck.

would explain why LG smart TV apps run like crap. The devices are not capable of handling a javascript engine at full speed.

Sure they are. The amount of JavaScript that actually needs to run to give you a video browser is very little at a time. The bloat is a software problem.

I mean, the biggest appeal of AppleTV is competent, high quality video casting via airplay 2 from a phone or laptop. Easily the least bad way to watch youtube on a TV is with airplay turned on from an iphone (with Youtube premium).

Agreed the interface is clunky.

> you can no longer see the content in case you paused to freeze the frame

You can press up on the D-pad to dismiss that overlay, if you want to see the full paused frame.

> How do you start it again? By clicking the same button, right? No! By clicking up.

Maybe we have different remotes? On the latest model, you play/pause with the same button.

One issue I’ve noticed in the app is there seems to be no way to move the cursor “up” to the channel button when the video is in the last 10% of the playback bar. If you rewind it a bit, then you’re able to move the cursor up there.

Only in the last few days have Shorts appeared at the top of my home page. I fear it may be the end for me.

I know Prime did this for quite some time, unaware if they still do. The main YouTube web app also suffers from this same issue, though at least the play button disappears.

Everytime YouTube gets an update it gets worse. This has been true for years. It's like their design and product team is run by second-graders.

It’s so bad. Last time I tried to use it I was unable to fill in my password for my account because Google had implement some custom input element and custom keyboard which did not contain some of the characters I have in my password. And of course there was no possibility to paste or use keychain.

If you have an iPhone you can input with that, including paste.

> If you have an iPhone you can input with that, including paste.

That popping up on your phone is not 100% reliable, though, and even more hilariously, when using it with YouTube, it'll sometimes just take the first handful of characters and drop the text input box on the phone. Oh, how we laughed.

(this may be a generic Apple TV problem but it's something I've only noticed on the YouTube app)

Swipe down from the upper right and select the "remote" icon. If it's not there, edit the menu and add it.

The YouTube app I have discovered that feature is the only place it is unavailable in.

Tried it from my iPhone now, but no, paste still does NOT work.

You have the keyboard input up and it doesn't work? You see the text on your phone, but it doesn't appear on the ATV? Never seen that one.

Yes! It doesn’t work at all. This is, as I wrote, that the YouTube app on Apple TV has a custom keyboard on-screen input without any way to put actual focus on the text/password field to trigger the Remote app on the iPhone to enable input such as pasting anything.

For example: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254761316?sortBy=rank

You'd think they've done it on purpose so you don't watch Youtube on TV. I tried but it's so bad you'd never open it a second time. And that's the platform where there are no ad blockers, so it must be good for them ...

> so you can no longer see the content in case you paused to freeze the frame.

It's similar on desktop, if you pause the video, an overlay with recommendations appears, and it prevents you from reading the subtitles, for example.

I've only experienced that on embedded videos, not on youtube.com . Are you experiencing it on youtube.com ? I tried it just now, and was able to view a video on youtube.com , pause it, and keep reading the subtitles with no recommendations popping up.

Disclosure: I work at Google but not YouTube.

Yes, it's possible that you are right - I checked it on a random video, and there is no overlay.

The YouTube app is the worst on its own site too. I don’t login to any Google account and I turned off site history, and now the homepage is completely blank. Yup. Google won’t even show me a single video on the homepage because I refuse to turn on history. Which is actually kind of nice for preventin distractions

I have the same. While it's a bit jarring the first time you see it, I now consider this a feature instead of a bug.

Maybe it could be styled a bit differently so the search bar is more prominent and in the center of the screen, but just having a search bar without any distractions is a fantastic feature.

If you want a pure search, you can get there from your address bar without even visiting the site first. Or if you really want the search bar on the site, you can go to youtube.com/search for a nice blank page.

You don't need the obnoxious refusal to show videos on the front page.

It's actually good, the default videos are usually fighting videos, dash camera videos and garbage TV series. You don't want to see them anyway.

That's just what it gives you.

Unless you're testing this with blank accounts?

You’re meant to use the dedicated pause button on the apple tv remote to pause without any overlay. Anything that uses the apple built in player has ui appear when you hit the center button. Same for Netflix.

No, in the Netflix app, the main button both pauses and unpauses. Same in every other app I use — except YouTube.

Oh, and I'll see your youtube and Raise you the Discovery Plus app (Maybe UK only?).

The content they offer is either a big back catalog of reality TV dross, or Live sport. The live sport streams, when left open when the AppleTV is turned off will always crash and go into a frozen state where there's no way out except by force quitting the app.

Reported multiple times to their tech support, no fix in 2 years. This for sports services that cost 30GBP a month, minimum, and with a regional monopoly on coverage.

> The YouTube app is easily the worst app on Apple TV.

The YouTube app is a walk in the park compared to the app for Hayu which is like torture sometimes it’s so buggy.

Does the search feature work for you? Mine gives me about 2 seconds to enter a search term, but once it has fetched results for the partial input, it keeps reverting the search field as I try to enter more, even if I delete to try again.

I would not be surprised if there is no QA team for the tvOS app.

> The YouTube app is easily the worst app on Apple TV.

I would've agreed until Netflix did their redesign and started pushing wrestling for whatever braindead reason. Some executives should just quit.

Perhaps it's a dark pattern to keep you using the youtube app on your phone and casting it

The iPhone app has weird bugs too. Currently (for me, at least) the brand text that appears in the overlay box on adverts is black text on a black background and virtually illegible. If they're not even worried about bugs in the revenue-generating ad part of the app, what hope is there for the rest?

oh, that's worse. there's been a bug for months now where airplayed videos forcibly select an autodub track in a random language, and there's no way to disable it or change tracks. i wish i was joking

I can genuinely only assume that Google simply refuses to do the sane, normal thing for the platform.

Given that every other app manages to get basic interaction right, I’m not inclined to believe it’s an os/hardware issue.

Is it a real app anyway on that platform? I doubt it.

Last time I checked, the LG webOS app was just running tv.youtube.com which only expects a TV-specific user agent.

I've been using YouTube.com/tv with a Samsung agent for years. Although I did have to recently switch from abp to ubo because abp stopped playing videos for me.

This is intentional on Google’s part. It’s anticompetitive behavior, to make YouTube service’s app shitty on Google’s competitor’s ecosystem. But no government seems to care—-and what will you do, stop watching YouTube?

> This is intentional on Google’s part. It’s anticompetitive behavior, to make YouTube service’s app shitty on Google’s competitor’s ecosystem

This would be true if the Android or Android TV would have been better. It is just profit maximization combined with crappy UX/UI. Google wants your personal data and will make UI changes to get it. (double record/send button in messages, UI elements very close to others so that they can be pressed accidentally, although there is plenty of space between other UI elements)

This is nonsense. Among other things, the YouTube app on Apple TV is superior to the one on Android TV. No loud startup sound, the back button exits the app rather than popping up a menu asking "if I'm sure" or if I want to go to a screensaver mode - clean straightforward UI.

> the back button exits the app rather than popping up a menu asking "if I'm sure”

YouTube did push a version of the Apple TV app that tried this, but it would cause the app to crash/black screen, no joke. They reverted it.

I guess they just hate their users lmao

Never ascribe to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence. And i think it’s fair to say the best and brightest at Google aren’t turning their attention to YouTube lately. Except maybe to make training datasets for Gemini N+1 :)

> Never ascribe to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence.

We were talking about Google here. (you know, former search engine, don't be evil)

In the case of industry giants malice should be assumed.

Can malice be emergent behaviour?

Well, psychopathy is an inherent feature of corporations. I wouldn't be surprised it malice will quickly develop where that appears profitable.

Their customers are advertisers, not users. By the looks of things they love them.

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