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Google has revamped its YouTube mobile app for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users with a redesigned Version 10.38 edition that the company says makes content easier to find and view, while giving users improved sharing capabilities.
The app, a 40.7MB free download, was created by Google and is available through the iTunes store, according to an Oct. 5 announcement. The app allows users to view everything from music videos to content featuring gaming, entertainment, news and more.
Users can tap an icon or swipe to switch between recommended videos, their video subscriptions and their YouTube accounts, while they can also subscribe to channels, create playlists, edit and upload videos, add comments or shares, or send a video to their television using the app.
Users can also now browse personal recommendations on the app’s home tab or view the latest videos from creators they follow on the subscriptions tab, according to Google. Plus, users can look up videos they’ve watched or favorited previously on the app’s account history tab.
Also available are new features that can be used to edit user-created videos, add filters, add music and upload a user’s videos, all inside the app, according to Google.
The app includes multi-language support, including English, Arabic, Bokmål, Norwegian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.
The latest YouTube app for iPhones, iPads and iPod touch devices requires iOS 7.0 or later.
A YouTube player used to be included in Apple’s mobile operating system, but that changed back in 2012, according to a previous eWEEK story. A YouTube app had been built into iOS since the first iPhones were introduced in 2007, but was dropped from iOS 6 as five-year licensing agreements between Apple and Google expired in 2012. When YouTube debuted on iPhones, it appeared before there even was an Apple App Store, giving YouTube and Apple an early opportunity to work together on the emerging feature.
After YouTube was dropped by iOS 6, Google quickly released a YouTube player for iPhones and iPod Touch devices running the iOS 6 platform in September 2012. In December 2012, Google unveiled a YouTube app version that included support for iPads.
Apple and Google began taking on a more adversarial tone when Google developed its own Android mobile operating system.
Google has continued to make other improvements to the popular YouTube service for users. In November 2012, Google announced that it was expanding its automatic video captioning services for deaf and hearing-impaired viewers and for those who speak foreign languages. YouTube has also continued to add support for more foreign languages to the automatic-captioning services that debuted in 2009.