The worst part of being an early adopter (very first world problems) is that nothing exists yet. When 4k HDR was first being supported, a couple of Netflix shows were there and... not much else (some YouTube videos of dubious quality) VisionOS is going to have a lot of new app developer excitement, and that's good! YouTube is one of the most used apps on my phone, $5 seems pretty reasonable.

You didn’t use an iPhone before iOS6? Hate to break it to you but they took quite a few years with the last platform!

> I’ve never heard of a 3rd party YouTube client.

There are plenty of cool 3rd party youtube clients. SmartTube, NewPipe and Invidious come to mind. Youtube Revanced could be considered as 3rd party youtube client as well.

These were recorded in the simulator as stated in the article by Christian. However there is a recording mode on the device itself as well, although as I don't have one I don't know the specifics.

The screenshots in the post are likely from the simulator.

There’s a screen record function, the same as the rest of iOS. MKBHD uses it extensively in his review video.

> but YouTube.com stinks — it’s a minefield of UI targets that are too small for eye-tracking’s precision [0]

[0]: https://daringfireball.net/2024/01/the_vision_pro

To be fair, there were plenty of 3rd party YouTube clients on Windows Phone that they didn't block (I even payed for one). They only really didn't want an official YouTube app to exist on Windows Phone, and the same will likely be true for VisionPro (even assuming that Google wants to try to bury VisionOS like they did with Windows - which is not clear yet). And a payed YouTube app will obviously have a tiny install base on any platform, so they don't really care.

>Which I was honestly kind of bummed about, as I wanted some way to give back to the creators of the tutorials I was rendering.

I'm sure they'd be happy to take direct donations. Many have Patreon accounts you can subscribe to. Those creators aren't getting any meaningful revenue from ads; that's why they all added those annoying sponsor segments.

I think the MKBHD video is on a normal consumer one

They’re the same thing you’ll get at retail

No idea why this comment was downvoted. YouTube (Google) can easily get Apple to ban unauthorized third party apps.

Once YouTube releases support for the Vision Pro, either Google will get Juno banned as an unauthorized third party app or make the API expensive to use even if Juno becomes popular.

> pump out a AVP app. early adopters of AVP likely to buy ($5-$10). Rake in that easy money while the big companies take their time in building their own app. Big companies then throttle or block those apis used by indy developers or require fee to use them. Indy developers likely to halt development and thus people end up on the official apps.

Precisely. Unfortunately the creator of Apollo has not learned anything about what happened to his reddit client and the same will certainly happen with this YouTube client.

> At its core, Juno uses the YouTube website itself. No, not scraped. It presents the website as you would load it, but similar to how browser extensions work, it tweaks the theming of the site through CSS and JavaScript.

It would be helpful if you you can hide the UI when pausing for screenshot, then!

I also have YT premium. On desktop, I use firefox and the popout video feature. It is easily resizable and movable. Downside is that js-player controls still show on the webpage, not the popout. On ios, once paused, just tap anywhere on the video anywhere there isn't a widget. That hides all the video controls for me.

Edit: Also there are keyboard controls for going frame-by-frame, if you need that much control. Or there was last time I used it a long time ago.

You don’t need a direct alternative to youtube to stop using youtube. You can just not deal with it, or access it via browser when needed, and use other platforms/media more instead. It might even become irrelevant on its own, like facebook and google search are slowly becoming.

But sure, if that’s not enough and you need a clone of youtube then yes, you need to develop a new youtube.

In what universe is 1 less than 0? I haven't paid one red cent for uBlock Origin.

If you tap on the settings/cog icon on a video, there’s an item for “additional settled”, which then has another item for playback controls or something.

Once you want to do anything else you have to exit everything and open it back up though, it’s not really efficient

Desktop only feature. Have to enable it. It puts a sidebox with a mini remote where suggested videos usually are.

It's under "Modify Playback with Premium Controls":

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6308116?hl=en

Yes. The question I was responding to. Exactly.

I always used to think that accessibility is for blind people, text readers and all that shit. Turns out that over the years accessibility ends up catching you one way or the other.

The question wasn't over $5. The question was over an extra $5, for a total of $10. $5 is basically the upper bound of where I'm willing to experiment.

The question is also very much about whether I am "supporting an independent developer with a tiny donation." A lot of stuff on app stores is spammy, scammy, and I explicitly don't want to support. Our dollars determine where our resources (as a society) go. I don't mind supporting good things, even with donations. I am currently fighting a company over <$3 which they got by fraud, not because it's worth my time, but because it's my civic duty; if I don't, they'll scam another million people.

The audience are HN readers -- entrepreneurs trying to make apps. The point isn't about me as what I ought to be doing (or about convincing others to be like me). The point is to honestly give customer insight, again, with an n=1. If enough people do that, there's a sample bias, but you do get better insight than nothing.

I'm probably going to stop doing that since "customers doing what we don't like" increasingly leads to downvotes. Either I'm communicating badly, people reading are increasingly bad at reading comprehension, or some combination there-of. These posts used to be valued a few years back.

However, as much as it didn't come across, the take-home message was intended to be that if you're running an honest business, you want to (and can) charge me more if you:

1) Clearly signal you're not evil. E.g. my data is treated with respect, you won't scam me, etc.

2) Give me enough information to be able to determine it's a product I want.

That's basic transparency, and a lot of startups lose my business because they screw it up.

Pretty much nothing. The docker image is less than 10mb and it uses barely any RAM for me, like 15 idle? I've got it running locally and can access it through tailscale everywhere. Having it open to internet is a bad idea since rate limiting becomes an issue but for a single user it's perfect.

Maybe it was a UX bug that hampers the experience to the point that where the website is a better experience, and they felt that a bad app would hurt the brand more than no app.

It uses the magic word: “for”

They’ll probably still send a C&D but it will be defensible.

> Google effectively introduced itself as a middleman between content creators and consumers, which they continue to do whether you pay with your attention/data or cash.

anybody else is free to introduce a content discovery & delivery scheme that would obviate the need for a advertising-laden middleman, but for some reason people keep downloading the YouTube app

What would be your ethical business model alternative to maintain YoutTube's staff, engineering, energy bill and hardware costs? Just to break even.

Advertising is the only business model that works at scale AND can support hypergrowth.

We know that subscriptions work at scale, mostly. YT Premium[1] has 100 million (Maybe 90M if there are 10M people only getting Music premium). But if YT was only available via subscription in 2010 during the gaming channel boom, it probably would have failed out of the gate.

But advertising is necessary to maintain the scale YT runs at today. 100 Million subscribers is nothing compared to the >2.7 billion humans that use it. Not all of them would pay even $2/month if you let them.

1: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/youtube-music-premium-1...

thrdbndndn was only advocating for always-on controls in non-fullscreen mode.

One reason people might enter fullscreen mode is to avoid seeing distracting things on the screen. Controls might be distracting.

in full screen mode, even after people turn their phone 90 degrees, you have not much space for visible control on a 16x9 video.

On iPhone the YouTube app will do full-screen in portrait mode. Grab the video title (under the video) with your finger and pull down. The rest of the UI goes away and you just get the video shown in the middle of the screen with large black areas above and below the screen.

This is besides your point but I thought I would mention it. I like controls that hide in full screen mode regardless of portrait or landscape because you want to focus on the content.

Not anymore, you can force portrait fullscreen In desktop for example: If you go into a vertical video with a regular "/watch?v=" URL, you can see vertical format video with regular controls

There was some way to get the same effect in android, but I can't recall right now

I would just like to see people copy some of Apple's UI functionality inside Quest apps. The official YouTube app can do the standard flat panels that any Quest app can do, but it's limited to living inside the 1x3 app row that all flat Quest apps are bound to. The thing I like best about the Vision Pro is that it's MR-first and apps can be placed and anchored anywhere without being locked to each other. That's not implemented in the base UI of Quest yet, but it could be implemented inside an app like YouTube, allowing either virtual screens or various levels of immersive 3D to be anchored to spots in a room. With the v62 update, the Quest can now bring up its 1x3 app row while running an immersive app and also save multiple rooms. My dream YouTube app would be something that could play videos anchored to spots in various rooms while also running regular 2d apps through the standard Quest interface. For example, imagine that you had your favorite news program attached to your refrigerator and a night sky view attached to your bedroom ceiling and a 3D jungle instead of the brick wall outside your apartment if you have an unlucky view. This is obviously beyond the scope of this app right now, but I think there will be interest among Quest owners to run apps that copy some of the MR-focused features of the Vision Pro interface and expand upon them. Using something like an embedded web view with a nice interface and then incorporating some anchoring abilities would be enough to expand the usability of something like a video player. And although this app doesn't run 3D videos, I think that's more of a limitation of the Safari APIs right now. Something using the Quest browser's native ability to run 3D video should theoretically work.

You can resize windows by clicking and dragging the corner of the window.

You can get rid of the ads on YouTube by paying 0.4% of the Vision Pro base model price per month.

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

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

That answers my question about the embeds not playing at all (thank you, that's what I get for speed reading), but I'm curious if there are other limitations.

It would matter to me, or maybe a Vision Pro user. If Google is holding out as a negotiation tactic, there may be an official app in the future, if Apple compromises on revenue share.

If it is contempt or another reason, maybe the possibility if an official app is less likely.

As little a share of it as they can get away with, in other words market rate wages

Until YouTube blocks you.

I'm really not arguing for any particular course of action but these options have real and potential time costs that need to be weighed against financial and mental load.

This is not reddit however have to say relevant username :'-)

My native language doesn't have gendered pronouns, so I make an explicit point of using "they" for a pronoun every time I can.

There is no ambiguity here.

It's a terrible pronoun since that usage is a retrofit of a word intended to be used as a plural.

You came across antagonistic, but fair enough, thanks for the apology.

Let me put it this way. I understand that you can block YouTube ads and have the techicnal means to block them at the DNS level. I also understand I can run different frontends for YouTube, but it is flat out easier and faster for me personally to not do that and to pay $22.99 a month for my entire family to enjoy ad free content. Time is money.

Also, I play a decent amount of video games and I send money monthly to content creators on said games I play. If something brings value to my life or makes things easier, I will pay for it. Just because I pay for something you do not like doesn't mean I don't support content creators via other means.

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.

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 .

---

[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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

The fact that he wrote the apollo app? I don’t know. It’s not exactly revolutionary is it

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.

YouTube disabling embedding would be fucking insane.

I think you missed my point there, but yes I agree with you on that.

AFAIK, sponsorblock isn't going to work with a 3rd-party YouTube viewer app like this.

Tons of respect for Ben Thompson, but reason for not shipping visionOS apps (or allowing your iPad app to work on them) for these big co's is literally a matter of "Bang for your buck":

> Building a new app from scratch makes zero sense for the size of the install base. Only reason to ever do that would be to get some love back from Apple in the form of features and attention (which, for YouTube / Netflix / Spotify are hardly necessary) > Allowing YOUR iPad app to function on visionOS means that your customers will hold YOU responsible for its functioning. At the size of customer base of these companies, that's a bunch of risk for no reward > When your users use a browser that promises 'regular access to all websites' (built by Apple) to access your service, the responsibility for that experience lies with the browser builder, not you

There's 100% no negotiation over fees happening with individual developers, regardless of how big they are, regardless of what type of support for a platform they promise Apple, as that's exactly what has gotten Apple and Google in hot water with regulators worldwide.

Ben worded it well in the article:

"It’s certainly possible that I’m reading too much into these absences" < Yes

> For example, Netflix would like to offer in app subscriptions and to keep more the revenue without sharing with Apple.

Netflix already has that option[0] at a 15% commission rate, but they snubbed their nose. Allegedly because they didn’t want to play nice with the TV app, like other streamers do.

Personally I think it’s that (and the potential loss of data) + them just wanting to pay $0.

0: https://developer.apple.com/programs/video-partner/

That's just apple being apple though, shipping half baked stuff 3 years before they're ready

That app literally broke YouTube's agreements with the music labels though (by allowing free downloads etc), which this one doesn't.

the android youtube / music app is much better than any other audio / video app i have including spotify, netflix

Everything Google does in their own ecosystem is smooth.

On the other hand, I have to imagine that to some extent YouTube is making maintaining their apps across multiple platforms harder than it has to be.

The app is almost entirely made up of tableviews/collection views/recycler views, save for the video player… really not rocket science. If YouTube’s public API were more capable I’m positive that third party devs would have no issue maintaining their YouTube apps across N platforms simply because they wouldn’t be overcomplicating them like Google is theirs.

No, not just when the gender is unknown.

OK, I'll bite. What are some alternatives besides advertising or paying a fee to get no Ads?

With keeping the same old UX yes it is. What YouTube offers for free is very generous. There is unlimited uploads. The high resolution options are free. The site is not behind a paywall. You can make an infinite amount of playlists which each have an unlimited size. You can have unlimited tabs open. Videos get automatic transcriptions, subtitles, and translations. Your streaming does not get throttled. Every user gets their own personalized feed. etc

You will be surprised to see how much money you need to pay in order to match the ads numbers. And running a global video platform needs very high CapEx/OpEx numbers compared to other web businesses. YT premium is very likely a much less profitable business, mostly meant for mitigating user complaints against ads + revenue diversification.

As someone with a YouTube channel, from looking at my metrics it's pretty clear that YouTube is being held afloat by a) the fact that non-technical users can't easily block YouTube ads on mobile devices, and b) YouTube Premium.

A single user depriving YouTube of their revenue is inconsequential sure, but when hundreds of millions of people do it (like with blocking ads on desktop) it obviously runs the risk of making the entire company unviable. Hosting videos for free is a great way to lose a lot of money.

> Explain what role advertising plays in you not paying a subscription to have access to ad-free videos.

Paying YouTube to not show me ads simply removes the inconvenience of not interrupting my watching experience. It doesn't get rid of any of the other issues I mentioned inherent to advertising as a business, which Google still is, whether I pay them or not. My data will still be used to show me ads on other Google sites, I'm still training their algorithms on how to keep me on their site for longer and how to better show me ads in the future, etc. And I'm supporting their empire, which I'd rather not do.

> And please, don’t tell me that you support them in other ways because I don’t believe you.

I don't care whether you believe me or not. The creators certainly don't get compensated nearly enough by alternative means, and I don't do regular donations or have any system to keep track of how much I've spent. It's surely a minuscule amount compared to what they earn from advertising. But it's not my problem they chose to rely on a business model I refuse to be a part of. If this bothers them, they're free to put up their content on other platforms, or behind a paywall. If, however, they upload their content on a public site, I have no qualms with accessing a public resource on my own terms. The fact you equate this to stealing is laughable.

And in all 3 cases, the Google equivalents are worse. History shows they’ll probably just be replaced with a different product to solve the same problem which will be worse in its own ways.

Subjective, but I use both Android and iOS daily. Interesting byproduct of Android being the favorite of those obsessed with customization is that the stock apps are almost universally bad because everyone just replaces them with different niche alternatives.

Has it ever been the case that the built-in apps are the best in their category? Should it be the case? Apple's strategy seems to be to make a simple offering that appeals to most people, and to leave the advanced/special/power features to third-party developers. I think that's a pretty healthy arrangement, though I bet many devs would prefer Apple not offer defaults in some categories at all.

What's so poor about Apple Notes? It's my most used app. Just curious.

What the replacements for contacts and clock would be?

For most of them, I'm not. But some creators have alternative revenue streams which I do support.

This is not my problem to fix. I don't feel guilty in any way for refusing to participate in a business model I don't agree with.

>Once, and if, I'm given the option to actually pay for the service I order instead of this insanely hostile experience, I'll happily tip for it as well.

You do. It's called YouTube Premium and it has no interruptions. You can turn off activity history and no data will be recorded nor will you get personalized recommendations. You have the tools at your fingertips, but instead you've convinced yourself that you're the victim in order to justify shorting the creators on whom you rely.

>would prefer to eat elsewhere

Okay, eat elsewhere then.