The UI issues I've noticed aren't really bugs as much as they're intentional UI changes that happen to be poorly thought out. I'm used to Google randomly changing the UI for seemingly no benefit, but these changes are especially egregious considering how much of my youtube interaction is muscle memory.<p>For example, you used to be able to double tap just about anywhere on the screen to fast forward or rewind 10 seconds. Now on the first tap the bottom half of the screen becomes an overlay with a bunch of action buttons, causing the second tap to inadvertently engage one of the buttons.
Youtube is pretty much a monopoly at this point. It has no significant competition. So they can afford to have plenty of bugs and indeed their fight against general purpose computation and preventing people from watching youtube outside of their prescribed web applications and smartphone apps has lead to the introduction of many bugs even in the browser.<p>I used to use youtube in a browser because it just worked. It had lots of nice features compared to youtube-dl/yt-dlp. But since they've worked so hard to prevent the use of such tools even my browser based youtube is regularly freezing the video for ~5-10 second periods many times during a play now (on multiple computers/firefox, via multiple IPs).<p>Youtube tightening their grip has made the youtube.com website so bad that yt-dlp is now actually a better experience. Rather than just an awkward way to preserve things.
This is why I have auto update turned off. It sucks but it's the only way to ensure that you continue to have a good experience with apps. I had an issue for several months while watching youtube fullscreen I'd do some gesture/interaction and suddenly it would be locked whole screen and I couldn't exit, switch apps or do anything. Only a reboot would solve it. No other apps had this issue. I finally tried an update and it's far less frequent. There is no way in heck am I upgrading again until absolutely forced.
I recommend ReVanced if you're going to use YouTube on Android device.<p><a href="https://revanced.app/" rel="nofollow">https://revanced.app/</a><p>This should also leave you on a slightly older version of the app, too, which might bypass any recent issues with updates. But, it has a ton of useful builtin features, like bring-back-dislikes and sponsorblock.
I've noticed minor UI bugs on iOS as well. When you skip an ad playing in landscape mode it will restore the video stream into the upper left corner. You need to leave and re-enter fullscreen to fix it. Not the worst bug but it's been around for a few weeks and is a surprising issue for such a common event on a major platform from one of the world's richest companies.
I thought it was only me, but when I went to update the app I saw that the most recent reviews all describe serious UI bugs and have thousands of likes.
This is why I only watch Youtube via Firefox mobile, plus I can use a adblocker with that.<p>Google is garbage at this point. Every employee there is simply promotion farming and has no concept of what a backbone is. Everything they do is utter trash and only about feeding their algorithm or collecting your data.