1y ago

YouTube and Spotify Won’t Launch Apple Vision Pro Apps, Joining Netflix

www.bloomberg.com

YouTube said in a statement Thursday that it isn’t planning to launch a new app for the Apple Vision Pro, nor will it allow its longstanding iPad application to work on the device. YouTube, like Netflix, is recommending that customers use a web browser if they want to see its content: “YouTube users will be able to use YouTube in Safari on the Vision Pro at launch.”

Technology @lemmy.world

AnActOfCreation @programming.dev

1y ago

YouTube and Spotify Won’t Launch Apple Vision Pro Apps, Joining Netflix

www.bloomberg.com /news/articles/2024-01-18/youtube-and-spotify-join-netflix-in-not-launching-apple-vision-pro-apps

45 comments

I don’t have faith Google could even make a good app for the device considering the iPad YouTube app is janky as shit and it’s been on the platform for years.
- Since the Android tablet space has been garbage for the last decade, I would assume they’d have at least put in some work to make the iPad app pretty solid.
  But I don’t disagree with what you are saying, really. However, if a janky iPad is what they think will make people jump to Android, I have a bridge to sell them.
  
  Google’s core business is ultimately ad sales, and any way they can collect data on you to sell you ads, and the get you to look at those ads, is revenue for them. Sure they would be able to collect more data if they had full control over your device, but as long as you’re watching their ads at all they are making money.
- I’ve had zero issues what so ever with the iPad app, what’s wrong with it for you?
  
  I use my ipad with a trackpad a lot, and often with stage manager on an external display. Youtube doesn't play well with that set up. Oddly it'll switch which background color to show (like from dark to light) and as a result the text can get unreadable because the text doesn't always switch with it. The chat/info panes sometimes won't work when you click on them. I've had it not let me click the share button because the share button wouldn't load.
  And, yes, Stage Manager is somewhat a niche use case, I suppose. But this isn't a mom and pop app dev. It's google.
  Even out of Stage Manager, they don't support the cursor targets like apps are supposed to (maybe they are just using one build and shipping everywhere and hoping for the best). PiP sometimes doesn't work well, and you have to kill the app and restart.
  They should do better with one of their flagship apps, is all I'm saying. And Apple, honestly, should do better on their end with stuff like this. They don't even have all native apps built for the Vision Pro that comes out in a couple weeks. It's like, you're the most profitable company on the planet and you don't even bother. It's crazy.
So…you can use the web version and can block all of their trackers and cookies with Safari extensions. Seems like it would be smarter for them to have their own app and get that data but whatever.
- That’s what I’ve been doing basically the moment safari extensions released. It’s not perfect, but it’s far superior to the YouTube app.
They'll launch their apps if/when Apple Vision Pro gains more traction.
YouTube is probably the biggest one missing, but it works just as well via a browser. Netflix has a lot of stuff but it's far from the only horse in town nowadays (and again, it should work fine via Safari). And Spotify is easily replaceable, as song availability is 99% identical between pretty much all music streaming services. People who want a Vision Pro will get it regardless of whether Spotify is available, and they'll likely just switch to Apple Music if they want to listen to music with the headset.
Awesome. YouTube on Safari with an adblocker spares me all that ad bullshit on my iPad and iPhone and makes YouTube actually usable, also I never saw a big difference between safari and the shitty YouTube app in's terms of usability and you have features from the app without having to pay for.
Is that Dave2D?
- It does look like that's him in the thumbnail! It'd make sense since only a handful of tech people have gotten to try the vision pro so far
Why invest time and money for what will likely be a small user base
- There’s a toggle button to allow the iPad versions of their apps to run on visionOS. It would take one person less than four minutes to allow it. Is it an amazing experience on Vision Pro? No, but it would be a good one at least.
  
  My understanding is that it’s the reverse of this. The iPad app is available by default. They’re putting in the (minimal) effort required to proactively disable availability of the iPad app.
  
  It's never that easy. There's always platform specific bugs and weird edge cases, and that's just going from phone to tablet which are pretty similar, this is even more different.
  
  Yeah, I’m a developer, and I’m accustomed to it. There are similar AppleStore Connect toggles to get iPhone apps onto iPad or MacOS. But the problem isn’t how easy it is to enable. It’s the future support.
  My product, design, eng and QA teams have been burned by this in the past. Someone clicks the toggle, it shows up on the store, and then we start getting tickets from an all new platform. Internal and external people start finding issues that were not a problem on the other platforms.
  Moreover, Apple doesn’t allow take-backs. You can’t easily remove a platform from a universal app. If you want one binary, and you decide that a platform is costing you more than it’s making you, then you’re kind of screwed.
  Veteran developers know this, and that’s probably why they held off. I would’ve done the same thing unless there was some sort of back-side business development or marketing deal that depended upon being on the platform.
Good. Fuck YouTube and anything involving them. It’s about time people walk away from their shit.
Why invest into an ecosystem that will only ever have a tiny user population?
When succeeding versions release that don't cause people to choke on the price, I'm sure that services will see fit to support those platforms in the future, if the user base is large enough.
Looks to be a disruptive device the others are scared of, otherwise they wouldn’t care.
- If you've worked with Apple's universal apps, you know that it's never truly free. Supporting the platform always brings new platform-specific bugs, platform-specific regression testing needs, product / design support for platform-specific experience quirks.
  It's going to be some amount of work, for an audience that will likely be small at first, on a platform that is already supported by the company's web experience. IMHO "wait and see" is the prudent approach.
  
  Just navigating their shitty submission process is a ton of work on its own.
- Isn't doing nothing to support the device not caring?
- Uh what? In what way would Spotify and Netflix be scared of this disruption?
  
  Apple is a content producer now too and has much deeper pockets than their competition.
  Why would the competition want people to buy into another cutting edge Apple product when they may want to develop their own solution to view their programming?
- Not making an app is caring? It’s not worth it to put the effort in. Small market.
Why would anyone want a Spotify app for this?
- This is the sort of sentiment that shows how misunderstood this device is. No shade intended.
  It’s not just a VR headset you play games in and watch movies in.
  They are saying spatial computing because it’s a computer. Listening to music while you do other things is normal on a computer.
  
  Fair point, but what would be beneficial about having an app vs just using the web browser?

45 comments