Comment by MBCook
4 days ago
I noticed this morning there was a new version of the YouTube app on my Apple TV. I can’t wait to find out how they screwed this one up.
My personal long-term complaint is the length of video titles.
Lots of people like to make really long video titles. So right now there is one on my screen titled “The Best Decisions Every Video Game Console Developer Made”.
Now if you didn’t know, that is not the whole title. But there’s absolutely no indication of that. The only way you actually know that is either by checking or if the stuff on the screen is clearly not the end of a sentence.
So what is the full title? Well if you click and hold on the video, you get a pop-up letting you choose a couple of things such as play or safe to watch later or indicate you’re not interested. And at the top of the pop-up you see more words in the title. In this case you also see “(Part”.
Yep. You get ONE extra word. Sometimes not even that.
The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video.
Obnoxious.
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.
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_.
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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?
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That is not my experience. It’s extremely rare for me to ever need to kill an app.
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would explain why LG smart TV apps run like crap. The devices are not capable of handling a javascript engine at full speed.
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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.
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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.
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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 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.
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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.
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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.
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.
The YouTube app is a walk in the park compared to the app for Hayu which is like torture sometimes it’s so buggy.
> 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.
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There are two apps called "DeArrow" and SponsorBlock that basically everyone should be using.
DeArrow replaces thumbnails and titles with crowd sourced versions. I can't use youtube without it anymore. Usually the titles get replaced with stuff like "How to build a table" instead of "Watch the world explode as I try to make a table!!!!!!!!!!!!". Same with thumbnails. No longer are they over-saturated close up AI generated garbage images, but usually just a screenshot from the video that shows what's really going on.
I used to use a browser extension that devolved thumbnails and titles. That seemed nice, but I stopped using it a few years ago because I don't want that kind of content in my life and changing the window dressing didn't fix it.
I do this instead: When a thumbnail and/or title is displayed on my screen feels like some variation of spammy clicky ragebait, I use the 3-dot menu and pick "Not interested" or "Don't recommend channel".
Nowadays, that kind of stuff is pretty much just gone.
This has certainly nuked whole channels (and also entire categories) from my youtube feed, and that suits me just fine. I need my life to be encumbered neither by clickbait, nor by the subset of creators that are compelled to generate it in the first place.
There's more good, interesting, non-bait content created every day than any person has time to consume. The herd is plenty big enough to be culled.
I think I'll be OK without watching videos -- at all -- from people who are working to jam the cock of influence as hard as possible into whatever they can.
A bad thumbnail doesn't mean bad content. If I rejected them upfront I'm sure I could find something to replace those channels that meets the bar of "interesting", but I'd rather judge videos on the actual video and focus on how much I enjoy watching.
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Neither of these are available on Apple TV. Otherwise, you make a good suggestion; install them where available.
At least for SponsorBlock you can run iSponsorBlockTV[1] on another computer on the same network - in addition to skipping sponsored segments, it also mutes YouTube’s own ads and auto-skips them as soon as it can.
[1] https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV
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Hey, Only 50% of one of my thumbnails are AI generated Garbage!
I do agree it is annoying. Some people do it quite a lot with car work videos to make the car look in far worse than it is.
Except that those two things are fantastic indicators for videos / channels you should be avoiding. Hiding their foolishness and then watching them anyway rewards their behavior.
LTT specifically AB tested the stupid thumbnail vs relevant + titles.
The idiotic clickbait images and titles WORK. People don't use them because they want to, they use them because they have to.
Thus -> DeArrow.
(Or follow the channels via an RSS feed and filter there)
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"Watch the world explode as I try to make a table!!!!!!!!!!!!" is unlikely its more like "Watch the world explode as I try to make this thing!!!!!!!!!!!!".
> Lots of people like to make really long video titles. So right now there is one on my screen titled “The Best Decisions Every Video Game Console Developer Made”.
Even with the missing “ (Part 2!)” added, that’s still only 68 characters. I would probably begrudgingly call this long, but I would definitely not call it “really long”—my threshold for that would be at least 90 characters.
If they’re truncating around 60 characters, I’m content to call it unreasonable.
It’s only “really long“ because it doesn’t fit on my screen.
I agree in the abstract it’s a perfectly reasonable title. It should absolutely be readable.
But it’s not. Because the app sucks.
Google News has this same truncation problem. I thought it would be an obvious thing to, I don't know, use the `title` attribute so mouseover reveals the rest of the snews...
I know no one likes hearing this because it's glib, but there's really no reason to use "apps" whatsoever. They're always worse in some baffling way, and until people start abstaining from them we'll be stuck here.
And how should I use a web browser on my Apple TV?
That’s not an option. And if it was? I wouldn’t want to use it.
You raise an interesting point. Performing the act of browsing the web on the TV from the sofa in the living room has been mostly[1] a non-starter for as long as we've had a web to browse, since the user experience sucks.
Dedicated remote-oriented apps usually do improve upon that user experience.
But does it have to be an app that runs within Apple TV's walled garden?
With a $20 Android streamer box (like the one sold under Wal-Mart's in-house ONN brand), a person can install SmartTube and watch ad-free YouTube with a configurable glitz-free remote-oriented interface and SponsorBlock. (If it dies or something better comes along, it was only $20. $20 doesn't buy very many cheeseburgers these days.)
[1]: There have been attempts to improve the WWW's sofa experience, perhaps with WebTV being the largest effort. And I've sat down with a trackpad-equipped wireless keyboard and run Firefox on some manner of television-connected computing device at various times. It's always pretty severely lacking compared to browsing the web with a laptop, desktop, or pocket supercomputer. Even though it's ostensibly almost exactly the same thing, it just never really flows well at all: It's worse than using a computer and also worse than using a TV remote in ways that compound with eachother.
>on my Apple TV
Not sure why you would rely on an AppleTV or any bespoke streaming device. It's effectively a service. If you like it right now, it will be worse in a few weeks, months, or years. Eventually it will be unsupported even though the hardware still works fine. You don't own it an it'll just be made worse by the different incentives of the hardware provide and the media streaming companies.
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They can use features like GPU, USB, NFC, etc trivially; whereas websites and PWAs may not be able to at all.
In principle they could have good UIs, but some accident of incentives manages to prevent this. It's better for forgo the features to retain control over your own device.
Every time you see an ellipsis "..." you know that the designer put form over function. Hiding data from the user is never the right answer.
They could use their fancy AI to generate shorter titles.
And if someone puts in a 500 character title, it still can't be truncated?
YouTube making up a shorter title would be so much worse...
> Now if you didn’t know, that is not the whole title. But there’s absolutely no indication of that. The only way you actually know that is either by checking or if the stuff on the screen is clearly not the end of a sentence.
> So what is the full title? Well if you click and hold on the video, you get a pop-up letting you choose a couple of things such as play or safe to watch later or indicate you’re not interested. And at the top of the pop-up you see more words in the title. In this case you also see “(Part”.
> Yep. You get ONE extra word. Sometimes not even that.
> The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video.
I'm looking at youtube right now. There's a video displayed with the title "Word Differences Between 11 Countries! | Europe, Africa, Asia , ..."
That "..." is the indicator that the title has been truncated. If you hover the title with your mouse, you can see the entire thing: "Word Differences Between 11 Countries! | Europe, Africa, Asia , America | Why Are They Similar?"
Not far away, there's "Alex Honnold Answers Rock Climbing Questions | Tech Support...", which expands to "Alex Honnold Answers Rock Climbing Questions | Tech Support | WIRED".
Am I using Apple TV? No. Is it really true that they removed the truncation indicator?
It’s different on Apple TV.
> Am I using Apple TV? No. Is it really true that they removed the truncation indicator?
Yes.
The latest version of YouTube for Apple TV has broken swiping on the remote's trackpad to select videos. (For the older style black Siri Remote, at least.)
The direction of your swipe no longer matters. All the app does is interpret wherever your finger _lifts up_ as a _directional tap_ on that side of the trackpad. So you can't do nice smooth accelerated swiping like it works _everywhere else in tvOS_; you can only use the remote as a bad D-pad.
Remember when the Youtube app overrode the AppleTV screensavers, to show their own screensavers if Youtube was paused.
Any other app, you leave a video paused, the OS screensaver will come on. Those beautiful, aerial screensavers that are better than any screensaver I've ever seen in all my decades of working with computers. So of course the Youtube app had to block them with their own shitty variant. They have no taste and no respect.
Your comment is past tense - does that mean they’ve stopped doing this? Please, Lord. I had to set my ATV to go to screensaver in a ridiculously short amount of time to preempt the YouTube one.
It was in place for a couple of days, tops, before they reverted it. The backlash was immense and immediate. And with good reason: in addition to the obvious reasons why it sucked, the YouTube screensavers just looked terrible. I couldn't believe how bad they were.
From what I've seen recently, they have stopped - I get Snoopy (current screensaver of choice) every time, no matter what app is running.
(Although it's on a 5 minute timer which might be short enough to pre-empt everything else.)
YES. That was HORRIBLE. Thankfully that only lasted like a day or two.
The fact that they would ever think that was possibly an OK thing to do though shows you how brain dead they are.
Long titles that put the important context beyond the fold are a form of clickbaiting, I just refuse to watch those videos entirely. I'm sure most of the videos are fine but I cannot reward bad behavior, and besides, clicking on clickbait will get you even more clickbait in the suggestions.
> I noticed this morning there was a new version of the YouTube app on my Apple TV.
Damn it, I still appear to be on 4.51.08/web_20251117_11_RC00 with no indication that there's a new version. Not looking forward to any updates...
> The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video.
I sometimes wonder if YouTube is a weird kink cult that gets off on people complaining about the ridiculously user-hostile decisions they make. Because it's either that or they're an evil troll cult that aims to make life just that little bit less pleasant for as many people as possible.
And yet here I am being told by young devs that these kinds of terrible UX decisions don't matter, or I get mocked for bringing them up. They don't have the cognizance of experience to know why these things matter or can, and they struggle to even conceptualize how things like this can be security holes open for spammers and scammers.
If they worked for me, they'd learn fast or wouldn't work for me for long.