Apple's Vision Pro headset will go on sale in a matter of a few hours now. It's a $3,499 headset from Apple that will support over 600 native apps and games as well as over a million apps from iPad. However, a few names missing in the catalog are YouTube, Spotify, and Netflix.
As per reports, there will be no official YouTube app for Vision Pro at the time of launch. Owners will still be able to watch YouTube videos in the web browser. But Christian Selig, the mind behind the Reddit app Apollo, has created a YouTube client for visionOS called Juno.
Selig explained in a blog post (via TechCrunch) that his previous understanding of YouTube came in handy while creating the app. His app Apollo "played back YouTube videos submitted to Reddit pretty well" and the developer reused some of Apollo's code to create a new YouTube client.
To recall, Selig was one of the third-party developers affected due to the API pricing changes introduced by Reddit last year. Thousands of Subreddits joined a 48-hour mass blackout that was organized to protest against the changes.
Juno uses YouTube's embed API to load videos in a webview and offers controls for playback. The app can detect aspect ratios of videos to resize the window automatically and doesn't block YouTube ads if the user is running the free version. The developer said that Juno uses the YouTube website itself and doesn't scrape data; it loads the website but tweaks the theme using CSS and Javascript.
It was a lot of work tweaking the CSS to get the YouTube website to something that felt comfortable and at home on visionOS, but I’m really happy with how it turned out. Does it feel like a perfectly native visionOS app? Well no, but it’s a heck of a lot nicer than the website, and to be fair Google apps normally do their own thing rather than use iOS system UI, so not sure we’ll ever fully see that.
The app is currently available on the App Store for a one-time fee of $4.99. Among various features, it comes with a translucent visionOS interface, native playback controls, automatic quality selection based on window size, resizable window, pinch-drag to scrub through the video, etc.
You can also view your recommendations, subscriptions, etc. in the Juno app and dim the surroundings to focus on the video. Selig has plans to add more features such as support for multiple windows, caption controls, and the ability to see comments.
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