Why the YouTube app for tvOS sucks so much

3 plausible theories

Corporate Pettiness

Companies like Google wish they could be more like Apple. They try, but they keep failing. To vent their frustration, they find ways of taking a dump on Apple’s success, such as dropping a real turd on Apple’s pretty TV garden.

Technical Stupidity

The app is crap because it’s built through some idiotic middleware that can only spit out lowest-common-denominator cross-platform shite. (See: Amazon Prime Video.) Some engineering manager convinced their bosses this was better than writing a platform-specific app because of some “efficiency” bullshit, and nobody could tell the difference in user experience because honey, that doesn’t even register in the brains of people who ship stinky logs like this. The ironic cherry on top of this weirdly hot cake is that the resulting crapp likely takes as much effort to maintain as a real tvOS app would.

Plain Incompetence

You’d think that the smart people at Google would know better, but maybe they just don’t. You never know what happens inside these big corporations. Perhaps they just don’t have the right people on the project, and the current team (and their whole reporting chain) just doesn’t know any better. I know I’ve definitely made the mistake of over-interpreting something as some kind of malice when it’s really just plain old ineptitude.

In any case, boy is the YouTube app bad on the Apple TV.