In case you’re not a connoisseur of technical Minecraft videos like myself – the screenshot above is not showing a mostly blank video. It’s showing a video that should fill the entire screen, but for some bizarre reason is shrunk down to the size of a stamp when rotated into landscape.

If you look carefully, you’ll see that this post actually ties back to the footnote about in-app browsers from a few days ago, because the mobile YouTube website here is of course loaded in one of those. It shouldn’t have, but it did. I don’t know why, or what I could do to make it behave differently. And I wouldn’t even care all that much if it at least almost worked. It’d be okay that it won’t be in my account’s watch history, no big deal. It might be annoying if I wanted to add it to a playlist, but really, I’m not asking for much. Just let me see the video.

I have a Google account. I made a YouTube page, channel, whatever they call it these days, which they forced on you years ago. I even pay for their Premium service. I have the official app installed on my iPhone. I’m doing everything right. I’m a good little customer.

And in theory, YouTube links should open in the app. Often they do. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes I’m stuck in the in-app browser instead. Seeing ads despite paying for Premium. Not being able to interact with things using my account. Being forced to this broken experience instead. There’s no pattern as to when it works and when it doesn’t.

And of course it’s not that big of a deal. I can just copy the link, try opening it again with actual Safari. Sometimes that will open the app. Sometimes it won’t, but show the “Open in the app” bar on top, though sometimes it also doesn’t do that. And I’m just so tired. Why can’t things just work. I only want to open a damn resource. What happened that something as benign as this has become such a horror show. I honestly dread interacting with links on mobile these days, because so often it will result in a 30 to 60 second interruption where I’ll have to perform some voodoo dance to make things work.