YouTube is barely usable on Google’s YouTube app on Google’s Pixel phones running Google’s Android OS at the moment.
It used to be that if one were watching one YouTube video and followed a YouTube link to another, that one would be prompted to either enqueue that video or go to it immediately. I used that all the time to enqueue an evening’s worth of videos.
Now, each link interrupts the current video and starts playing. Which means that I instead have to watch the video, then go back to my list of videos to watch, then select another one.
Also, it used to be that YouTube links would just open in the YouTube app. This was nice. Now, they open in an embedded version of the app, which means that my current app (say, an RSS reader) is blocked until I finish watching.
It’s all so annoying. Why does Google make the experience of using its own products worse?
My take is that Google products have always punished people who have bad internet connections. 10 years ago I had a crappy DSL connection which could usually handle Netflix, Amazon Video, etc. YouTube was unreliable.
Google Meet never worked well for me, even after I got my ADSL upgraded to a more reasonable 20Mbps. Zoom works fine. Skype works fine. Discord works fine. The chat built into Slack... works fine. Google is a standout.
Your take directly contradicts my personal experience. 10 years ago I had a crappy internet connection that went down to as little as 10KB/s (severe network congestion and building management didn't care). YouTube served 144p video when every other video site went down only to 240p or even 320p, which was unusable on this connection.
It used to be that if one were watching one YouTube video and followed a YouTube link to another, that one would be prompted to either enqueue that video or go to it immediately. I used that all the time to enqueue an evening’s worth of videos.
Now, each link interrupts the current video and starts playing. Which means that I instead have to watch the video, then go back to my list of videos to watch, then select another one.
Also, it used to be that YouTube links would just open in the YouTube app. This was nice. Now, they open in an embedded version of the app, which means that my current app (say, an RSS reader) is blocked until I finish watching.
It’s all so annoying. Why does Google make the experience of using its own products worse?
Oh, yeah: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41337899