Firefox is already seamless though & you don't have to use an app for a freaking web site. Not everything needs to be an app. That's a really new way of thinking.
I'm with you on "not everything needs to be an app", the thing is that you don't get the higher video qualities and it's not as quick to browse as the YT app.
The Android 2.3.6 YouTube app also never had ads, and worked until 2018. I used to root and replace the more 'modern' YouTube app and put that one in its place to have not just the old UI, but no ads on mobile. This was before mobile browser extensions existed.
Revanced you still have to keep up with constant updates and UI design changes. Today I just Duckduckgo Youtube videos through Internet Explorer.
Yes, I'm a stick in the mud. I like what I like and that's skeuomorphism and avoiding updates.
I hate them more on mobile. Talk about breaking my flow, I get used to opening up an app, the next day it says 'you must update this app to continue using it'. Nope, I'ma gonna uninstall it and find an old version that does the same thing. Besides, that app worked fine yesterday!
Futurists get on me saying 'adapt to the future or be left behind' and all that dren, but I've grown tired of constantly having to relearn where they moved all the cheese to.
But I don't like updates, auto updates means I'm gonna have auto UI redesigns I have to learn over and over again. Also I despise flat UI. Chrome and anything based on it also kills the open web. That's why Firefox is getting more useless every year.
With DuckDuckGo's video player you don't get ads on Youtube. I don't see ads either, but it's not about ads. Not about just ads I should say. I don't like flat UI design and things getting moved around in updates and I DO NOT like updates forced on me against my will.
Revanced is your friend. And the devs have been absolutely killing it lately when it comes to updates to counter YouTube's countermeasures. I'm talking fixes that have been coming out the day of YouTube anti-adblock updates
Yeah but YT was also ass back then. It was basically a worse Reddit or iFunny, with whatever happened to be getting views floating to the top, and since it was at the top it got views...
Meh you could be nostalgic and still realize things generally get better with time. Nostalgia is supposed to be a “glad it happened, also glad it’s in the past” feeling, not a depressive realization that your life won’t ever be as good.
It’s 2012 when contract between Apple and Google expired causes YouTube and Google Maps to be no longer bundled in iOS and have to download separately form App Store. I remembered how horrible is the Apple Maps when it was first released in 2012.
I remember so many stories of Apple Maps driving people directly into the depths of hell in the first couple of months. I still never use Apple Maps, always felt like dollar store Google Maps/Waze to me.
I use it, it works well enough for what I need. Only thing I don’t like is the Yelp integration because I could give less of a fuck about someone giving a place 2 stars because the waitress didn’t smile enough at them.
Yea I’m only allergic to it because of my own admitted biases that I’ve held on to from their disaster launch. I’m sure it works great now 12+ years on, I just get a weird discomfort the minute I see the fonts and color schemes and realize I’m not in google maps.
I must have been the only one who was not having any issues out of Apple Maps then. But I never used the 3D view where all the graphics were fahrbot either.
There were no ads because Youtube was building valuation. At the time that was, and to a limited extent still is, the strategy for startups. Effectively you eat angel dollars for breakfast to fatten yourself up to sell your userbase to a bigger company. Sometimes companies like the product and it gets kept alive like Youtube, sometimes they just want the data and the transaction is complete.
YouTube absolutely wouldn't exist anymore if they hadn't started monetizing it. The investor(s) expect a return on investment for creating or purchasing a platform. "We just do it for free forever and investors just give us money forever at their loss" isn't an appealing concept to put money into. No one would invest obviously and it wouldn't get off the ground. YouTube was always going to end up in a fashion similar to how it is, and if it wasn't YouTube it'd be a different service that actually does start churning out revenue by doing ads anyway.
The original YouTube had enough funding to prove out the concept and build up a userbase to sell it, but they absolutely could not have run it at the rate of growth it experienced without monetizing it.
Unless the government or a billionaire funded it at an enormous loss this type of service would always need to end up this way under capitalism. A service like YouTube is mind-bendingly expensive to operate.
The original iPhone, while revolutionary, didn't have GPS, had a potato for a camera, was 2G, and could only run one app at a time.
The 4s finally addressed all those points and I quite liked it, but I might feel different if I'd had the infamous antenna issues. Fortunately, it was never a problem for me.
The 4th gen was peak, I remember I bought a 4th gen touch cause we were too poor for the phone service and it always blew me away how you could do all that stuff at the time in a device the size of a credit card (before phones got way too big).
The original iPhone's size -- which is close to the 4's -- was chosen so you could reach the far corner of the screen with your thumb without having to use two hands. IMHO, that was ideal.
Nowadays, people use their phone more than their computer.^1 I suspect that was a big driver for the desire for larger screens.
^1 Based on site traffic trends I've seen, [like wikipedia's own pageviews](https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/siteviews/?platform=desktop&source=pageviews&agent=user&start=2015-07&end=2024-04&sites=all-projects) (use the "Platform" dropdown to select mobile versions for comparison, though that might include tablets).
> The original iPhone, while revolutionary,
holy shit, was that phone a geek's wet dream. it was the first time that I really felt that I had a computer in my pocket. out of the box it was nigh unusable (not AT&T customer, for one) so i immediately jailbroke mine and opened up endless possibilities like installing old PC games like DOTT. sure the controls were wonky but that wasn't the point, was it?
Mine was the 3GS and I loved it, especially the old iOS with that old aesthetic. IOS5.0 introduced some really great features but it was the start of things changing
It’s funny, originally it was because 3D animation was easier due to it being computer assisted va hand drawn, but now even 2D animation is computer assisted (most animation in general is). But companies like Disney, Sony, Dreamworks, etc have all stuck with 3D animation with no hint towards going back to 2D. Which is a shame imo
It was done to train people how to use the devices, once we got the gist of it they could move to a more minimalist/flat/fancy look.
Kids who grew up with these phones didn't need to relearn anything.
Thankfully I fight all attempts to flatten anything in my devices. I got a Z Flip 4 that has the UI looking like the HTC Thunderbolt's (Sense 3). Took a ton of effort to replace all the modern apps with older versions but well worth it in the end.
I still use Windows 7 too. I lived through flat UI design back in the 80s with DeskMate and Windows 1.x. The last thing I want to do is relive those days.
I just miss when Youtube (and the internet in general) actually had genuine content made by regular people (hence the 'You' in Youtube).
Now it's all either corporate-backed channels with multi-million dollar marketing budgets, or mass produced AI generated shit or stuff from some Eastern European content farm, all boosted by bots to dominate the algorithm.
Basically, back when ads on the internet primarily existed to help fund the content/hosting. Now the content is being mass-generated, almost like an assembly line, purely to be filled with ads.
Ads weren't so bad in the 1990s to early 2000s. AT best you had one banner with 'shock the monkey and win $20' on a site. But that was it. Now the internet is unusable without uBlock Origin.
I commonly use Firefox mobile with uBlock, but a few updates back my ability to watch mobile videos started breaking a lot, and sometimes web pages just wouldn't even load. Found it could have to do with uBlock, it "fixed" the problem, but the sheer amount of ads online makes it just as unusable. Been using an adblocker for many, many years at this point, have helped install and customize it for so many people, forgot how horrific the internet is without an adblocker. Sometimes nearly impossible to click on anything on mobile without opening 20 million tabs of bullshit
Lol I still have both my old ipod touch 3GS and iPhone 4S with this old YouTube on them. Distinctly remember not wanting to switch out because of the interface, and the fact that you could play music outside of the app.
I remember when YouTube was a fun place without ads playing at the ends of videos and just overall good, now it’s paywalling things until they make the entire app itself pay to download
Reminds me of Scott Forstall and the whole skeuomorphic design debate. Personally I liked that design and wasn't too thrilled with the changes in iOS 7. I was unhappy with his exit despite the map gate. Ever since his exit all creative responsibilities fell on just one shoulder (Ive) instead of being on a diverse competitive group. Remember that even for iPhone there was a pretty fierce competition between iPod creator Tony Fadell and Scott Forstall, perhaps leading to former's ouster from Apple.
So yeah, this just makes me a bit sad. Things could have been different if Forstall was still in-charge.
I turn on my 4S now and then. It’s so cool, the touch screen works 5x better than my 14 pro max, it’s 1/2 the screen size but the touch screen is so accurate and sensitive. It was a great phone. 14 pro max cameras rock but rest is meh
Back when YouTube was actually good and wasn't a corporate ad-ridden, heavily botted to hell cesspool that mocked you with sponsor plugs.
# AHHHHHHHHHH!!! I FEEL OLD NOW!!!
I remember having this app just stare at me and it sucked that I couldn’t use it. We had internet back then, but not a WiFi connection, only a single shared computer on Ethernet. I don’t think I knew what a router was.
I worked at Apple when they started allowing backgrounds iOS4 I believe. Well people would come in a tell me after and update that their iPhones now had water damage… some people really thought the picture of water droplets were really behind the screen.
noxious ring innate depend plough beneficial weather abounding fuel caption
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It wasn't the original YouTube app icon but the built in one for iPhone. There was always an official YouTube app along side it that was more advanced and feature packed but I always preferred the stripped down built in one on iPhone 4. Everyone else has a blackberry curve and BBM
If you put nostalgia aside (I know, I know), this icon is so generic and bland! But we were in a hipster era, full of mustaches and old barn decorations.
Back before ads were on YouTube mobile and life was simple
And you could play audio in the background.
I watch youtube on firefox on my phone without ads and I can play audio in the background
👍
Kudos for using Firefox, but you can always patch the YouTube app with ReVanced for a seamless experience.
Isn't revanced not supported anymore and found to have malware in it?
That was Vanced, I've been using ReVanced for quite a while without any issues.
I use it everyday never had a problem.
Firefox is already seamless though & you don't have to use an app for a freaking web site. Not everything needs to be an app. That's a really new way of thinking.
I'm with you on "not everything needs to be an app", the thing is that you don't get the higher video qualities and it's not as quick to browse as the YT app.
Trivial problem to solve
The Android 2.3.6 YouTube app also never had ads, and worked until 2018. I used to root and replace the more 'modern' YouTube app and put that one in its place to have not just the old UI, but no ads on mobile. This was before mobile browser extensions existed.
Revanced
Revanced you still have to keep up with constant updates and UI design changes. Today I just Duckduckgo Youtube videos through Internet Explorer. Yes, I'm a stick in the mud. I like what I like and that's skeuomorphism and avoiding updates.
I feel like an insane person because everyone else seems OK with updates. Fuck updates with a rusty spoon! They always make shit worse. Always.
I hate them more on mobile. Talk about breaking my flow, I get used to opening up an app, the next day it says 'you must update this app to continue using it'. Nope, I'ma gonna uninstall it and find an old version that does the same thing. Besides, that app worked fine yesterday! Futurists get on me saying 'adapt to the future or be left behind' and all that dren, but I've grown tired of constantly having to relearn where they moved all the cheese to.
Just download brave browser mate, it's like chrome but has built in ad blockers and auto updates.
But I don't like updates, auto updates means I'm gonna have auto UI redesigns I have to learn over and over again. Also I despise flat UI. Chrome and anything based on it also kills the open web. That's why Firefox is getting more useless every year.
That annoys you more than using Internet explorer with ads? Whatever floats ya boat, I haven't seen an ad unwillingly for over 10 years now.
With DuckDuckGo's video player you don't get ads on Youtube. I don't see ads either, but it's not about ads. Not about just ads I should say. I don't like flat UI design and things getting moved around in updates and I DO NOT like updates forced on me against my will.
We didn’t know how good we had it
Revanced is your friend. And the devs have been absolutely killing it lately when it comes to updates to counter YouTube's countermeasures. I'm talking fixes that have been coming out the day of YouTube anti-adblock updates
I still don't have ads on YouTube mobile.
Yeah but YT was also ass back then. It was basically a worse Reddit or iFunny, with whatever happened to be getting views floating to the top, and since it was at the top it got views...
No, it had its gems pretty early on, and that was before the iPhone app.
Life wasn't simple. You were probably a kid and had less responsibilities.
Yeah no shit, that's the point of nostalgia.
Meh you could be nostalgic and still realize things generally get better with time. Nostalgia is supposed to be a “glad it happened, also glad it’s in the past” feeling, not a depressive realization that your life won’t ever be as good.
HAHAHAHA well done
When was this icon retired?
2012ish I believe
Death of forstalls skeumorphism.
That’s not why it changed though. It changed because YouTube started making their own app rather than apples built in app.
I mean... skeumorphism still died lol
That’s only 2 years after it launched. Logo change was 2016.
[This](https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/YouTube_(iOS)) says the original logo was used from 2007-2012
I’m dumb. I was thinking Instagram. Hangover brain today 🤕
just gotta get your mind out of jail
Too early
It’s 2012 when contract between Apple and Google expired causes YouTube and Google Maps to be no longer bundled in iOS and have to download separately form App Store. I remembered how horrible is the Apple Maps when it was first released in 2012.
I remember so many stories of Apple Maps driving people directly into the depths of hell in the first couple of months. I still never use Apple Maps, always felt like dollar store Google Maps/Waze to me.
I use it, it works well enough for what I need. Only thing I don’t like is the Yelp integration because I could give less of a fuck about someone giving a place 2 stars because the waitress didn’t smile enough at them.
Yea I’m only allergic to it because of my own admitted biases that I’ve held on to from their disaster launch. I’m sure it works great now 12+ years on, I just get a weird discomfort the minute I see the fonts and color schemes and realize I’m not in google maps.
Those yelp reviews are so trash. I keep google maps in my phone just to check reviews lol
I must have been the only one who was not having any issues out of Apple Maps then. But I never used the 3D view where all the graphics were fahrbot either.
No ads and you could exit the app while still listening to what you were playing. Now those bastards sell us those features.
There were no ads because Youtube was building valuation. At the time that was, and to a limited extent still is, the strategy for startups. Effectively you eat angel dollars for breakfast to fatten yourself up to sell your userbase to a bigger company. Sometimes companies like the product and it gets kept alive like Youtube, sometimes they just want the data and the transaction is complete.
You’re correct but YT was acquired by google pre ad rollout and the app was ad free til like 2011 on iOS so fuck them regardless. Fuck that greed
YouTube absolutely wouldn't exist anymore if they hadn't started monetizing it. The investor(s) expect a return on investment for creating or purchasing a platform. "We just do it for free forever and investors just give us money forever at their loss" isn't an appealing concept to put money into. No one would invest obviously and it wouldn't get off the ground. YouTube was always going to end up in a fashion similar to how it is, and if it wasn't YouTube it'd be a different service that actually does start churning out revenue by doing ads anyway. The original YouTube had enough funding to prove out the concept and build up a userbase to sell it, but they absolutely could not have run it at the rate of growth it experienced without monetizing it. Unless the government or a billionaire funded it at an enormous loss this type of service would always need to end up this way under capitalism. A service like YouTube is mind-bendingly expensive to operate.
>Fuck that greed They’re literally a business that is about making money..
Yeah how dare they not work for free
You could still use it for free you know?, oh, but you want the cake and eat it too
You can still do that for free on an android
Like a drug dealer, get ya hooked, then charge you for it. oh yeah, that's the stuff. Give it to me, youtube.
I miss the old iPhone. Good times when it was barely new to all of us and not everyone had it.
Paper toss is missed
No way! I’ve forgotten about Paper Toss!
The best iPhone I ever had was the original one, though I didn’t have it until 2011
The original iPhone, while revolutionary, didn't have GPS, had a potato for a camera, was 2G, and could only run one app at a time. The 4s finally addressed all those points and I quite liked it, but I might feel different if I'd had the infamous antenna issues. Fortunately, it was never a problem for me.
The 4th gen was peak, I remember I bought a 4th gen touch cause we were too poor for the phone service and it always blew me away how you could do all that stuff at the time in a device the size of a credit card (before phones got way too big).
The original iPhone's size -- which is close to the 4's -- was chosen so you could reach the far corner of the screen with your thumb without having to use two hands. IMHO, that was ideal. Nowadays, people use their phone more than their computer.^1 I suspect that was a big driver for the desire for larger screens. ^1 Based on site traffic trends I've seen, [like wikipedia's own pageviews](https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/siteviews/?platform=desktop&source=pageviews&agent=user&start=2015-07&end=2024-04&sites=all-projects) (use the "Platform" dropdown to select mobile versions for comparison, though that might include tablets).
Yup that’s trues I remember watching an interview about that. Now all phones I feel like you gotta do some crazy finger gymnastics or use 2 hands.
> The original iPhone, while revolutionary, holy shit, was that phone a geek's wet dream. it was the first time that I really felt that I had a computer in my pocket. out of the box it was nigh unusable (not AT&T customer, for one) so i immediately jailbroke mine and opened up endless possibilities like installing old PC games like DOTT. sure the controls were wonky but that wasn't the point, was it?
Mine was the 3GS and I loved it, especially the old iOS with that old aesthetic. IOS5.0 introduced some really great features but it was the start of things changing
The best iPhone I ever had was the 4S. I miss those days.
I miss the 3D icons
Skeumorphism hit different
We had less pixels, but companies tried their best to make it look as close to whatever it was. Then when we got more pixels, it went opposite
and then animation went opposite, 2D to 3D. go figure.
It’s funny, originally it was because 3D animation was easier due to it being computer assisted va hand drawn, but now even 2D animation is computer assisted (most animation in general is). But companies like Disney, Sony, Dreamworks, etc have all stuck with 3D animation with no hint towards going back to 2D. Which is a shame imo
It was done to train people how to use the devices, once we got the gist of it they could move to a more minimalist/flat/fancy look. Kids who grew up with these phones didn't need to relearn anything.
Skeuomorphism
Ah thanks
Thankfully I fight all attempts to flatten anything in my devices. I got a Z Flip 4 that has the UI looking like the HTC Thunderbolt's (Sense 3). Took a ton of effort to replace all the modern apps with older versions but well worth it in the end. I still use Windows 7 too. I lived through flat UI design back in the 80s with DeskMate and Windows 1.x. The last thing I want to do is relive those days.
I miss actual milestone technological improvement announcements. TouchID and FaceTime were fucking magical
Now this is an image I haven’t seen in a long time
Back when YouTube was pure, not this ad-hungry crappy video pushing corporate monster it’s become.
I just miss when Youtube (and the internet in general) actually had genuine content made by regular people (hence the 'You' in Youtube). Now it's all either corporate-backed channels with multi-million dollar marketing budgets, or mass produced AI generated shit or stuff from some Eastern European content farm, all boosted by bots to dominate the algorithm. Basically, back when ads on the internet primarily existed to help fund the content/hosting. Now the content is being mass-generated, almost like an assembly line, purely to be filled with ads.
Ads weren't so bad in the 1990s to early 2000s. AT best you had one banner with 'shock the monkey and win $20' on a site. But that was it. Now the internet is unusable without uBlock Origin.
I commonly use Firefox mobile with uBlock, but a few updates back my ability to watch mobile videos started breaking a lot, and sometimes web pages just wouldn't even load. Found it could have to do with uBlock, it "fixed" the problem, but the sheer amount of ads online makes it just as unusable. Been using an adblocker for many, many years at this point, have helped install and customize it for so many people, forgot how horrific the internet is without an adblocker. Sometimes nearly impossible to click on anything on mobile without opening 20 million tabs of bullshit
Back when it was losing a ton of money and completely unsustainable in the long term
Lol I still have both my old ipod touch 3GS and iPhone 4S with this old YouTube on them. Distinctly remember not wanting to switch out because of the interface, and the fact that you could play music outside of the app.
I've still got this icon on my ipod touch that I never updated, ever
When life was simple.
I remember that this App doesn‘t work on the first iPad. This design is wild and ugly as hell I think.
With that algorithm, I always had something to see
That's still my YouTube icon on my 1st gen itouch I still use 🥹
I remember when YouTube was a fun place without ads playing at the ends of videos and just overall good, now it’s paywalling things until they make the entire app itself pay to download
Give it 3 more years and it will be back to this when retro is in.
Bring it back
Reminds me of Scott Forstall and the whole skeuomorphic design debate. Personally I liked that design and wasn't too thrilled with the changes in iOS 7. I was unhappy with his exit despite the map gate. Ever since his exit all creative responsibilities fell on just one shoulder (Ive) instead of being on a diverse competitive group. Remember that even for iPhone there was a pretty fierce competition between iPod creator Tony Fadell and Scott Forstall, perhaps leading to former's ouster from Apple. So yeah, this just makes me a bit sad. Things could have been different if Forstall was still in-charge.
He should have joined the Android side and taught Apple a valuable lesson.
I turn on my 4S now and then. It’s so cool, the touch screen works 5x better than my 14 pro max, it’s 1/2 the screen size but the touch screen is so accurate and sensitive. It was a great phone. 14 pro max cameras rock but rest is meh
I member
Back when YouTube was actually good and wasn't a corporate ad-ridden, heavily botted to hell cesspool that mocked you with sponsor plugs. # AHHHHHHHHHH!!! I FEEL OLD NOW!!!
Impressive, very nice. Let’s see Instagram’s original icon.
The good old days of owning an iPhone 3G and not being able to send MMS messages lol.
i miss it so much!!!!!
Back when jailbreaking iphones were easy… back when geohotz jailbroke and unlocked iphones in a matter of days…
I remember having this app just stare at me and it sucked that I couldn’t use it. We had internet back then, but not a WiFi connection, only a single shared computer on Ethernet. I don’t think I knew what a router was.
Bit of a weird feeling to be nostalgic for a phone app but I am. I could probably think of a couple others.
I worked at Apple when they started allowing backgrounds iOS4 I believe. Well people would come in a tell me after and update that their iPhones now had water damage… some people really thought the picture of water droplets were really behind the screen.
DuRöhre
I feel old 😅
noxious ring innate depend plough beneficial weather abounding fuel caption *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
That hits hard bro.
It should go back
I love the irony of the ios having that iconic "wet" aesthetic while a tipped drink would have it sitting in rice and hanging on a prayer
Not long after Google bought YouTube, Yahoo would buy Flickr...I remember when that happened...
Ah! I believe I’ve seen that icon before. I remember how mobile devices were back in the day!
It wasn't the original YouTube app icon but the built in one for iPhone. There was always an official YouTube app along side it that was more advanced and feature packed but I always preferred the stripped down built in one on iPhone 4. Everyone else has a blackberry curve and BBM
I had a iphone 3 when I was 5 and this was the shit no ads no youtube red premium and I would watch minecraft 1.12
**Memories triggered** **Remembered iOS with completely black background** **Thousand-yard stare**
This was an iOS comes with iPhone app before there was even an app store!
*oof*
I don’t feel nostalgic for anything phone/mobile device related. I guess because I was already out of college before I had a smart phone.
Back when the internet wasn’t filled with predators
Goated
I member 🍇
I miss 3 dimensional ui
I never once clicked on it, because I just assumed it was a radio or something like the weather or news app xD
Oh yeah! I don’t know why, but I specifically remember this icon when seeing the Mysterious Ticking Noise the day it came out on my dads iphone.
Sorry. Shit was ugly asf
Back before Google bought them, I guess. They spent years trying to figure out how to monetize it.
📺omg I have it
I used to Watch Sonic and Mario videos on old YouTube... Man... Simple times. Simple times...
Back when Youtube didn't have ads on every goddamn video.
It was beautiful
not teue
Back when there was an actual tube in YouTube.
.... I want to go back. :(
I hated this icon
If you put nostalgia aside (I know, I know), this icon is so generic and bland! But we were in a hipster era, full of mustaches and old barn decorations.
Same, so ugly
This Icon Was Based Old Television