YouTube's Apple TV app was completely broken.
Update.
It has since been fixed. I actually was watching stuff YouTube when suddenly, stuff started working well again, which seems to indicate that it was server side and not client side? Werid.
So the Apple TV version of YouTube is a broken piece of shit and it has been for several days now with no fix in sight. And I'm going to talk about it.
I just wanted to get that frustration out there, and also to say, hey, if you're using an Apple TV and YouTube is broken for you too, well, it's not you, it's just YouTube.
I have always hated YouTube on the Apple TV. And to be honest, I've always hated the Apple TV, but I've been using it for a simple reason. It's that outside of making my own thing with a setup like Kodi or whatever, it is the only TV box that isn't riddled with ads.
So while I never really liked YouTube on the Apple TV, an update or something has been pushed to it recently and we have reached a new low. It's completely broken now.
How broken are we talking?
Bordering on unusable, honestly.
The issues are that YouTube will start crashing randomly. It will have trouble launching videos. If you leave a video on pause too long and the screensaver appears but it will look broken and the video will restart on its own in the background, probably scaring the shit out of you in the process. Shorts have no images. Sometimes it will refuse to launch videos, and more often than not they will launch at what appears to be a random time in the middle of the video.
The YouTube app has always been subpar in my opinion, but now we're reaching a point where the simple act of playing a video is completely unreliable. Pressing play on a video is a roll of the dice as to what is going to happen. Is it going to launch correctly? Is it going to launch in the middle of nowhere on the timeline? Is it going to crash the player? Is it going to completely crash the app? Is it going to crash the entire Apple TV as it happened to me once?
Who knows, it's a game of chance, and I'm shaking with frustration induced anticipation.
So, while I can't explain you why the app is so unstable to the point of it crashing randomly for no reason very often, and why some videos just flat out refuse to launch no matter what you do, I can explain some of the weird behavior that YouTube is having, or at least I can theorize about what's happening.
A spectacularly stupid bug.
So the thing I mentioned about YouTube starting videos at random times? Well, it's not random.
You see, YouTube has this cool feature that remembers when you stopped a video. That data is cached and it is remembered by the app so that when you press play on the same video again, it allows you to pick up where you left off. This feature has always been surprisingly unreliable, but it's there and it is convenient.
Well, that's what's causing the issue.
Of course, I can't look at the code to properly tell you what is actually happening and even if I could, I wouldn't be able to tell you shit about it because I wouldn't be able to understand any of it but regardless, here's what's happening.
Every time you watch a video, the time you spend on that video is recorded by the system so that it can be remembered for when you come back to that video. This data is usually stored within the account history, so that no matter where you start watching the video again, you will be able to pick up where you left off, no matter the device.
Except that for some reason something changed and that timestamp of where you left off is cached in the app and not the history. And this misplacement of the timestamps changes a lot of things, because it's trying to apply itself to everything.
So let's say you're watching a 46 minute video. You've decided to stop at 23 minutes because you're not interested or you want to take a break from that video or whatever the reason is and you open up another video that you have never seen before and that also happens to be 54 minutes long. That video will open and start at 23 minutes because the timestamp data of where you last left off the previous video is cached in the app and therefore tries to apply itself to every video you try to watch.
But it can get even more stupid.
So, to go back to the original scenario, you're done with the 46 minute video, you stopped at 23 minutes. Now you decide to watch a video that is 8 minutes long. You open the video and it crashes and throws you back to the feed where you found it.
That happens because when you open that 8 minutes video YouTube is trying to apply its timestamp data of 23 minutes to it, gets confused because it's looking for something that simply doesn't exist in the video and therefore backs out.
This bug makes it absolutely "amazing" to listen to albums on YouTube music. Because every single track on the album will pick up with the time stamps of the previous ones. So if you listen to a song that is 3 minutes and 42 seconds, the next song will pick up at 3 minutes and 42 seconds. And if it's shorter, it will simply crash or skip the song entirely, maybe even move up the album playlist until it can find A song where it can resume at 3 minutes and 42 seconds.
But it gets even dumber! Because it does that with streams as well!
So today after listening to something like a three-minute song, I decided to open a live stream that is playing music. And to my fucking horror, YouTube applied the same timestamp data as it does with everything else. And because I ended the song at around 3 minutes, the stream started at around 3 minutes! I was 12 hours behind the current stream!
I didn't actually check, but if this applies this way to stream, it means it must work the other way around too. So if I somehow manage to open a stream that has been running for 400 hours and it opens up on its current live timestamp position, that means that when I'm leaving this stream, the bug will try and start any videos that I try to play at around 400 hours....
There is a workaround.
There is a simple workaround to this bug that is equally as stupid as the bug itself.
Every time you end a video or you get close to the end, go back to zero seconds and exit the video. And if you can't do that because the video is over you need to find a video that is longer to be able to open it and then go back to zero.
There you go. Most video should open without any issues. But you need to repeat that every time. Oh, and also the app may crash for no fucking reasons. That's just what it does now.
It's kind of funny, but it's mostly infuriating.
I've hated YouTube for a long time now. It's just that we're stuck with it because it's by far the biggest and most convenient platform for these kinds of things. But this monopoly has allowed them to do some really stupid shit and get away with it.
But this is a new low. The YouTube app is easily one of the biggest app, if not the biggest app for the Apple TV platform. Pretty much every users uses it. And it's been completely broken like that for several days now. And it feels like YouTube just doesn't give a shit.
When you are Google, when you're the size of Google and when you have the kind of money that Google has, there is no excuses for something like that. It is simply unacceptable.
And I know for a fact that if I was using a Google product and not an Apple one, I wouldn't have that issue. Because that's what these platforms do. They're using each other's systems while being extremely passive-aggressive with one another and not supporting one as well as the other. So they're having their little pissing match, and in the end, we the consumers are, as always, the ones getting pissed on.
There you go. I hate it. I really don't like the Apple TV. It is such a subpar experience on so many levels, but at least it isn't filled with ads. But now YouTube is completely and utterly broken on it and it has been for several days with no fix in sight. Wonderful.