[Design Overview] YouTube - Great on desktop, horrible on Android
YouTube is one of the most popular platform on the web. I easily find myself watching it way more often than TV. And it’s because it’s a great service — you watch whatever you want whenever you want for price as small as watching a few ads. But great service doesn’t mean that you can use that service in just as great app. At least not always.
While I’m not a professional designer, I’m a learning developer and user who really enjoys good design and, because I’m a fan of Google, I also love to see Material Design in the wild. In my Eyes On Paper series I express my feelings about implementation of Material Design in apps and how they could be improved.

Update: YouTube has went through a redesign since this has been published but it didn't change much. I have done necessary edits to the article.
There are two ways to watch YouTube on Android phones, and I think both of them pretty much suck.
YouTube mobile app
The most obvious way to access the service is from the official app. Sadly that app doesn’t have the best reputation. It was one of the biggest reasons why people kept saying Android can’t keep apps in RAM — YouTube app loves refreshing when picked from recent apps, even when it could function without it. It also suffers from a lot of bugs and while many of them were fixed in newer updates there are also new bugs almost with every update. Such as the new app bar which is shorter than it should be and it is driving me crazy

But I could accept all of those shortcomings because it was still using beautiful Material Design with tab-based navigation, smooth transitions and vivid colors. Bright colours got replaced by overused white, the tab navigation has been replaced by bottom bar and fluid swiping transition has been taken away in favor of.. disappearing and appearing. While motion is one of the most important parts of Material Design, designer at YouTube decided to get rid of it. Also app violates some other rules that are in the same section of guidelines, such as “Navigation through the bottom navigation bar should reset the task state.”


Another pain point hits you when you try to edit your playlists. Want to rearrange? You have manual mode in sorting settings that does.. absolutely nothing. Or maybe you would like to quickly remove videos? No way! And when removing bunch of videos faster than a turtle would do it, app loves to throw 500 server errors at you.
Focusing more specifically on Watch Later, you finally have option to remove watched videos, but sadly app treats videos you just started to watch same as the fully watched ones and remove them, which is far from ideal for a guy like me who likes saving videos here when I have to stop watching them in the middle of playback.
And the Chromecast UI… I think everyone who tried it know how loudly it shouts for improvements. Overall look is a bit outdated and lacks core functionality such as reordering items in queue. Also there’s huge lag when you try to rewind or fast-forward watched video which is giving horrible experience. But now I will show you how to fix that lag: minimize the video description (enjoy that broken animation), open up the queue again, go to your home screen and back to YouTube app. Slider is hidden so there’s no way to trigger that lag, brilliant! That’s why I’m a huge hater of bottom bars in most Google apps, they’re just unfinished and lack polish.

The good things: Channels’ pages still look beautiful with tab interface, many colours generated based on channel image (I hope YouTube desktop also did that) and easy-to-use layout of videos. Transitions from lists to playlists look very smooth and cool. There's a good control over playing videos presented in a pleasant way - you can change resolution, playback speed and caption options from a good looking bottom sheet.
Also search is worth mentioning as it’s one of the best I found in Google apps recently. It gives you access to filters to easier find content you’re looking for (Google Play should really adopt this feature) and suggests you content based on your previous activity (as opposed to Play Music) so it’s very cool.
The mobile website
I’m not gonna spend much time talking about YouTube’s site for phones because I don’t use it very often and I don’t think you do either. You could even don’t know it exists. And it’s good because it’s very, very bad site, at least for serving it’s main purpose — viewing videos. I did never use YouTube website for anything else than watching videos that doesn’t want to open in app but instead prefer your browser. I checked it out before writing this and it seems like it looks OK, lacks animations, has some YouTube functionality and present no real reason to use it when you can just open an app that comes preinstalled on Android devices.
Back to the point — how is it to watch videos in mobile web version of YouTube? Bad. Firstly — you can’t choose resolution, so if similarly to me your network is capable of 1080p but YouTube prefers 360p you have no way to tell it how wrong it is and you’re forced to watch in potato quality 🥔 Another thing that drives me crazy: videos have captions turned on by default. Happily, you can turn them off. You also get Chrome’s default media notification which might help you when you’re trying to enjoy YouTube in the background but also may clutter you notification tray. You also don’t have double tap gesture to rewind or skip ten seconds easily. Oh, and the interface is your browser’s default media player.
Wouldn’t it be better to put there little “open in app” button like in tons of other websites, YouTube?
And there’s one more thing — you can think “oh, it’s a website, what did you expect from it?”. I expect something from that website because I know that Google can build amazing mobile web experiences. Just take a look at Biograf — it’s a web app made by Googler working in Chrome Developers. Why can’t they make mobile YouTube at least a bit better?
Desktop website
It’s basically a totally different story. And yes, I don’t use desktop YouTube as much as I do on mobile but I have used the site for a long time now and I came to like it way more than mobile versions of the service.
Desktop YouTube preserved similar look for a long time now. And it’s cool, because people got used to it and liked it. Now, they released new, Material version of the site. And if you were expecting drastic changes (like in Google+) you could be kinda disappointed, because YouTube still pretty much looks the same. But it’s great! They did an amazing thing: they preserved full functionality of the site and gave it a fresher, Material look. And I love that approach. Access to most used features is easy and intuitive, for example when you put your mouse on video, a button appears to add it to Watch Later and it’s great! Damn, if there was something similar on mobile it would save me around 30 taps every week. I don’t know how about you, but I always use Watch Later on YouTube so it’s very convenient to me. It’s also worth mentioning that that behaviour is consistent among various places on the website.
However, it’s not perfect yet. When you’re viewing playlists you have to go back to old YouTube to remove or rearrange videos (at least you can rearrange them) but it’s easier thanks to a button. Also layout switches back after you finish editing so I’m OK with it. Just hope they will add that functionality later.
Another small, yet annoying thing is that website doesn’t use right clicks. I got used to triggering specific menu when right clicking from Google+ or Play Music but sadly it doesn’t work on YouTube, it just brings your browser’s menu. It’s little but for me it’s annoying.
Also I miss some colour from channels. I got used to bold and colourful channel pages on mobile and huge amounts of white disappoint me a bit. Don’t get me wrong, I like single colour UIs on desktop, they really drive away distraction and directs attention on content, but hey, white everywhere? Not for me.
But the biggest downside of this is the lag that sometimes happen when playing videos on lower end devices. My laptop isn’t powerful, but I’m sure it’s capable of playing videos smoothly. YouTube, however, sometimes decides to lag, even heavily on higher resolutions. Around last week (from time of writing this) it was impossible to play 1080p 60 FPS video. I hope it’s fixed by now, I didn’t really check it recently.

But one of the best features is the one that I didn’t talk about yet: dark mode. It’s so gorgeous that Google decided to bring it to it’s second app. Yes, there’s another dark Google app, it’s Play Movies on Android. It’s only a detail but it really makes you feel like you’re sitting in your own cinema and I love it, especially in video centred apps. Also it’s cool to see something different in still growing sea of white, boring looking Google apps.
So yeah, that’s what I think about YouTube’s apps, but I’d love to hear what do you think? Do you agree with me? Or maybe do you like bottom bar navigation? Tell me what you think in comments and if you want to — share, maybe someone from YouTube will see this and make their mobile app great again.
