YouTube Go

» see youtube.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I know exactly what YouTube Go was for, because I spent years on the far side of the problem it solved. From 1998 to around 2005 the modem at home climbed from 14.4k to 56k in stages, and every byte that came down it had a price you could feel in your chest. YouTube Go is that feeling turned into a product decision: tell the user the size before the user agrees to it. By September 2016, when it was announced, I had been on broadband in Ankara for a decade and had not thought about the weight of a video in a long time. The app showed up for a problem I had already stopped having.

It came out of Google's India work and it went to India first, as a beta in April 2017, then out to more than 130 countries. Nearly all of them were places where a phone was somebody's only computer and mobile data was bought in small amounts from a shop. It passed five hundred million installs, which is a number almost nothing that gets discontinued ever reaches.

Google announced the end on 3 May 2022 and the app went off in August, about ten months after its final update. The reasoning was published and it was straight: entry-level phones had gotten faster and the main app had been worked over for slow networks, so the gap Go was built to sit in had closed.

~ the record ~

~ what it did that the big app would not ~

The features were small and specific. A video's file size appeared in megabytes before you committed to it. You chose a quality tier at download time instead of finding out the cost afterward on your balance. Both of those admit something the main app has never wanted to say out loud, which is that watching video is a metered purchase for a large share of the people doing it.

The best of it was the offline handoff. Two phones running Go could pass a downloaded video to each other over a local link, no network in the middle, which meant one person with a data bundle could supply a room. That is a distribution model rather than a feature, and it belongs to particular kinds of places. Nothing in the main app took it over.

~ the price of being the small version ~

Go was missing most of YouTube. You could not comment and you could not upload, there was no dark theme, and the machinery that exists to keep you watching one more thing was mostly absent from it. That was the trade, and the cost of the trade was that everyone holding it knew they were on a lesser version of the product than the person beside them with a better phone.

Google's argument for killing it is the one I believe, because it is the argument my own connection made twenty years earlier: the constraint got cheaper faster than the workaround could stay worth maintaining. A cheap Android phone in 2022 was not a cheap Android phone in 2016. What did not get cheaper everywhere was the data, and the app that used to quote you the price of a video in advance is not there to ask anymore.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »