Google not sabotaging YouTube on Windows Phone after all Microsoft has debuted a new, native YouTube app for Windows Phone 8 with a completely redesigned interface, despite its earlier claims that Google was deliberately preventing it from delivering a first-class YouTube experience on the platform. There has always been a YouTube app available for WP8, but it didn't take long for …
"Windows Phone invested additional engineering resources against existing APIs to re-architect a Windows Phone app that delivers a great YouTube experience. ... Microsoft did not receive any additional technical support to create the Windows Phone YouTube app."
In other words, reverse engineering, which Microsoft itself despises and works against (particularly with Skype)?
Wow, gun jumper! HTML5 implementations on the different handset OSs (and manufacturers builds for a certain Googly OS) are way too inconsistent to be claiming apps aren't needed. If you know your market and target the most popular devices you can cover just them, but fixes for one renderer can break another, and as soon as you start shipping device specific stuff you may as well be developing device specific apps.
It is definitely the way to go though, I think we just need a few successful HTML5 sites to push the manufacturers to agree on exactly how the standards should be implemented....
quote: "or you could just access the site. Youtube does HTML5.Apps are no longer needed."
Unless the target video is still in Flash, which "for technical reasons" is all the ones that want to show interstitial ads and provide proper behavioural tracking. Strange how many videos off Youtube don't work in Firefox (missing plugin required) until you install / allow Flash player.
As long as people want to make money off their Youtube channels (and Google want to make money off their advertising partners), you will have Flash videos instead of proper HTML5 ones. At least until HTML5 includes the same persistent cookies and other tracking features currently provided by Flash, so they can provide a fully HTML5 compliant advertising feature.
Cynical? Moi? ^^;
"Windows Phone invested additional engineering resources against existing APIs"
Sounds a lot like "Google did not help us, so we had to RTFM and get some smart folk to actually do some work on this product".
As for MS claiming "a bad boy hid the APIs and won't give them back" it really could not happen to a nicer company.
" Microsoft did not receive any additional technical support to create the Windows Phone YouTube app"
In nutshell, the first guy we talked to said it could not be done and it must be Google's fault.
We sat down and thought about it for a bit and worked out how much cash they would be loosing from advertising and thought "really?"
So we got some guy out of the local work experience program to spend more than 5 minutes and found out it was a piece of piss
Because innovation happens in small groups, not massive borgs of workers. Even when you find a good skunk works operation with lots of people, those people are largely in small, mostly autonomous groups that can quickly move on new ideas. Even 50 people in the working group is getting large for that kind of innovation.
If Google are to be blamed for the poor YouTube app who is to blame for the abysmal music player on WP8? A music player where you cannot edit a playlist after creation. A music player where you cannot see what music is on your now playing list. A music player where you cannot clear your current playlist. A music player where you cannot add or remove tracks to existing playlists or in order to create new playlists.
I could go on but you get the idea. I can forgive and work with a lot of annoying issues but for such a basic function of a smartphone they've managed to make it the most infuriating music player I've ever had to use. I'd also like to know whose smart idea it was to link media volume to ringtone, alert, message tone volume and thank them for giving an example of what to avoid for future creators.
No commercials. Reading and swapping through comments while you watch etc. etc. Now wait for Google to block the reverse engineered stuff. So you can sue.
Btw, It would be great if we could skip the google sign in if you want to favorite something. Can you reverse engineer that too? So the list of your favorites is actually stored on your outlook account in the cloud instead of a google account?
Ah anyway, you would have done better making a great dailymotion app, there's much more interesting stuff to see there ;-)
"Just got done pinning a channel to my start screen (try not to be jealous android users)."
I'm managing not to be 8-)
Anyway, I second the I'm with Gordon Pyra on this one -- I think most likely, the app writers just were not familiar with youtube APIs (I mean, if you've never written a youtube app before -- I sure haven't -- then you'd have no reason to know them), just assumed some stuff wasn't possible, then found out actually it is.
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