Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

After 4 years, the YouTube app still sucks

dontwalkhand

dontwalkhand

macrumors 604
Original poster
Jul 5, 2007
6,579
3,252
Phoenix, AZ
Apple really needs to look into the issue of poor YouTube performance on Wi-Fi. I looked the issue up and they said router settings are to blame...one issue if I am at school or work, I don't own the router! Why can it load fine on 3G and on my Mac, but not my iPhone? Even for private training vids, they load SLOW on Wi-Fi.

There is no reason it should take longer than the video to load the video.
 
dontwalkhand said:
Apple really needs to look into the issue of poor YouTube performance on Wi-Fi. I looked the issue up and they said router settings are to blame...one issue if I am at school or work, I don't own the router! Why can it load fine on 3G and on my Mac, but not my iPhone? Even for private training vids, they load SLOW on Wi-Fi.

There is no reason it should take longer than the video to load the video.
Click to expand...

yeah its brutal, most people say use the safari version the app just plain sucks, no real fix
 
Once you realize what the native YouTube app is downloading, you'll realize it isn't slow nor does it suck. It actually downloads HD instead of HQ like the mobile YouTube does (which is why it loads faster). Do a comparison between the two apps and you'll see the difference.

What Apple needs to do is put a quality setting in the app.
 
The search on the YouTube app is also a joke. There are no filter or search preferences at all.
 
Last edited:
I agree, the YouTube app sucks. It's probably their worst app. And worst of all is it's built-in. They need to do something about it in iOS 5. Too bad it doesn't seem likely.
 
The YouTube App hasn't been a problem for me so far (touch wood). Sure, it doesn't have all the nifty features, but it works for what it does on my phone.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8G4 Safari/6533.18.5)

I agree. I avoid watching YouTube on iPhone as much as I can
 
I've used it maybe 3 times? I always use Safari. I can't stand the youtube app. Half of my subscription's videos were not even being shown because I was not 'subscribed' to them... Garbage.
 
I used to have huge issues with YouTube. It would take literally minutes to load a 15 second clip. I don't care what the quality is, my broadband isn't that slow.

I read about resetting safari cache, cookies and history. It kind of helped, then when I upgraded to 4.3 everything got better. I could actually stream almost instantly rather than waiting for it to buffer 80-90% of the video. Not sure why it fixed it for me but not some others.
 
it may load hd on the but it takes minutes to start sometimes and when it finally does it stalls out for minutes again no matter how fast your connection is...

Who cares about HD quality on a 3.5" screen anyway? And if you say your streaming it or something to your TV your telling me you dont have any type of recent hardware at all that has netflix built into it? Pretty much any DVD player out there has it now, any xbox, ps3 or wii, and all the newer tvs sold have it built in.

no idea why some would stream it from there phone in the first place..
 
jayenh said:
I used to have huge issues with YouTube. It would take literally minutes to load a 15 second clip. I don't care what the quality is, my broadband isn't that slow.

I read about resetting safari cache, cookies and history. It kind of helped, then when I upgraded to 4.3 everything got better. I could actually stream almost instantly rather than waiting for it to buffer 80-90% of the video. Not sure why it fixed it for me but not some others.
Click to expand...

Shockwave78 said:
it may load hd on the but it takes minutes to start sometimes and when it finally does it stalls out for minutes again no matter how fast your connection is...
Click to expand...
I haven't had those issues. It just loads incredibly slow for me which is what HD does on my Mac. I'm not trying to suggest using the native app. I use the mobile version since most of what's on YouTube doesn't need to be seen in HD.
 
Even aside from the intermittent loading issues mentioned above... the navigation is just crap. There's no search filters, channels are handled really badly, playlists are handled clumsily etc etc.

It's a really terrible app. Admitting so and just pulling it so Google could make their own at this point would be considerably preferable.

Phazer
 
It does suck on the iPhone , whether I'm on 3G or wifi. I'll use my droid x to watch YouTube. My android does have HQ setting over wifi & that could be the problem with iPhone , no setting
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back