There’s a new bug in the YouTube TV app for Google TV that is so utterly stupid that I need to rant about it.
When you play a video and press back on the remote, it should jump back 10 seconds. Well, now it now jumps back 10 seconds… and then immediately skips forwards 10 seconds to where you were before. So pressing back is basically doing nothing anymore, other than glitching a bit. You have to press back multiple times, or pause first and then press back.
The same thing also happens when you press forwards: It skips forwards 10 seconds, and then jumps back to where you were before.
This is already pretty annoying. But now comes the best part:
There’s this “Jump ahead” YouTube Premium feature that entirely skips a commonly skipped segment. You press forwards once, it knows that many people skipped this segment as well, and then jumps ahead to where other people usually jumped to. It basically allows you to skip sponsor segments quickly. So you press forwards once on the remote, it skips to the end of the sponsor segment, and you can immediately continue. That’s a really great feature! The UX is a bit meh but in theory it’s a great idea.
But now, with this freaking new bug, it skips the sponsor segment, then glitches back, and then thinks that you didn’t want to skip the whole segment (because it looks like you jumped back), so it removes this skipping point so moving forwards won’t skip the whole segment again. Which means you can’t skip the segment again. So this whole freaking feature is now not working anymore.
There are some UX lessons here about these “magic features” that sometimes appear and disappear that I might want to write about in the future, but for now I only care about how the actual fuck it’s possible that the YOUTUBE APP—the official app for THE SECOND MOST VISITED WEBSITE ON THE WORLD—developed by FREAKING GOOGLE is constantly shipping broken crap that’s noticeable within seconds of using a core feature. When did software turn so shit?
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