Youtube and the Shaken & Stirred app

martin · March 10, 2019, 9:46pm

Recently, iPad users of our Shaken & Stirred app have encountered fullscreen playback trouble with the videos presented in the app.

What has happened is that Youtube has removed the button to invoke fullscreen playback on the iPad. They did this without announcing it or justifying it. Still more recently, we’ve noticed that Youtube has even removed the fullscreen button for the iPhone, too, although you can still get fullscreen playback on the iPhone by employing a pinch gesture. (This gesture does not work on the iPad.)

Meanwhile, Youtube has adjusted their terms of use prohibiting any display of Youtube-hosted videos that isn’t expressly through their web interface or their own app. And if you do use Youtube’s web interface, then you can—sort of—view their videos fullscreen. It’s not real fullscreen mode, just a web interface that presents the video in a screen-filling manner.

Youtube is perfectly within their rights to make these changes, even if it’s a bit of a jerk move.

We are preparing an update to Shaken & Stirred that will fix the problem by always invoking the video within the Youtube web interface (or app, if you’ve got that installed). It’s less elegant than what we began with, but it works.

Bunny · April 7, 2019, 8:54pm

If you have this problem, you shouldn’t be selling this in the App Store for $9.99 with the old description. I’d like my money back because each video is prefaced by an ad. I never would have paid for an app with advertisements.

martin · April 8, 2019, 1:49pm

Hi, welcome to the community!

If you would like a refund for Shaken and Stirred, I believe this page describes how to request one. (Only Apple can give refunds.)

We haven’t made any changes to the description of the app in the App Store or the web site since late 2017, so I don’t know what you mean by “old description”. I do understand that you are raising a perceptual problem that I did not anticipate that may have been exacerbated by the March 28 1.2.6 update.

Shaken and Stirred does not contain advertisements. The app is 100% ad free, unless you count the launcher and Appendices page that pertain to the other six recipe apps in the suite.

Shaken and Stirred is different from the other apps in the series in that each recipe links to YouTube videos by @RobertHess (and a few by Jamie Boudreau). These videos are not contained within the app and are not part of the app—they’re web content that has always been available to anyone to watch for free, most conveniently indexed at Small Screen’s web site. As with any YouTube content, YouTube may elect to insert or superimpose ads with their video streaming.

YouTube tightly controls how any of their content is accessed. There’s no way to present a YouTube video except through a specific YouTube-supplied web player (or by opening it in YouTube’s own official app). We’ve tried to make viewing these videos as convenient and in-context as possible within Shaken and Stirred—why not?—but we’re still just streaming them in essentially the same way as you would from YouTube.com in a web browser. With the 1.2.6 update on the iPad, we’re now literally opening the YouTube.com web page in a web browser view, unless you’ve got the YouTube iPad app installed, which will intercept it. This was the best option left to us by the changes YouTube made that are discussed at the top of the thread.

So, while Shaken and Stirred contains no ads, when you watch the videos (anywhere), YouTube may choose to insert or overlay video ads as is their want. This has everything to do with YouTube and nothing to do with Shaken and Stirred. Any iOS app that streams video from YouTube is subject to the same limitations.

(Aside: as of 1.2.6, all seven of our apps now have a new page in the Appendices that link to a couple of tutorial videos, also hosted on YouTube. They behave the same way.)

That said, I have never myself seen a situation where every video is getting prefaced by an ad. I don’t know how you got there, but that does sound really annoying. I’ll look into it a bit to see what options are currently available (anything to do with ads on YouTube is, as we have learned, a moving target).

One suggestion I have—assuming you’re on an iPad—is to try installing the free YouTube app. The app may or may not provide you a preferable experience. The app also supports YouTube Premium, which may not interest you, but it’s (currently) one clear way to avoid ads on YouTube content.