I’m loving Google’s native YouTube iOS app a lot although it’s lacking in some key areas.
Specifically, I’ve come to appreciate its sleek user interface, especially on the iPad, along with social sharing, the ability to browse my individual subscriptions, AirPlay playback and other capabilities.
Today, the Internet giant pushed another update and it’s kind of a big deal.
For the first time, the software is able to access Live Streams and that’s huge because I can now watch those live events and news conferences on my iPhone or iPad as they happen. But that’s not all. Read on for more…
UPDATE: YouTube version 1.3 apparently crashes for jailbreakers who have YourTube or ProTube installed, so you may want to steer away from today’s update. Alternatively, you can uninstall those tweaks until they are updated to support the latest version of the YouTube app.
@idownloadblog after update to 1.3 YouTube crash on start on my iPhone 5 with 6.1.2 with JB
— Qbik (@j_jurk) April 15, 2013
So, you can now queue up videos to play on your television, which requires pairing the app with a YouTube-enabled TV screen. Google provides handy instructions on how to do that in a support document here. Though available on Android for some time, this ability has been enabled with a February update to YouTube’s iOS client.
YouTube version 1.3 also includes stability and performance improvements and One Channel branding for video creator channels. This is what it looks on an iPad.
Last, but not the least, the software lets you quickly browse through all of the new uploads from your subscriptions. This is the missing feature I’ve been looking forward to for a long time.
As a heavy YouTube user who is subscribed to dozens of channels, I was frustrated having to browse individual channels to see what’s new. From now on, I can just visit the My Subscriptions feed on the Guide to browser just the latest uploads, which is going to save me a ton of time.
YouTube, as always, is free to download from the App Store.