While Google has declined to release a native YouTube application for Apple‘s new Vision Pro augmented reality headset, independent developer Christian Selig has stepped in to fill the void. His new application called Juno, available now in the App Store for $4.99, aims to provide a rich YouTube viewing experience similar to what you’d expect from an official app.
Although unofficial, Juno nails most of the core functionality you’d want in a YouTube app. You can browse videos, easily scrub and skip through them with pinch gestures, and it respects aspect ratios. Browsing YouTube’s vast catalog is supported as well, minus the ability to view comments. In an effort to avoid upsetting Google, Juno will even display ads before videos.
Behind the scenes, Juno taps into YouTube’s embed API which is commonly used to embed videos in websites. When you want to browse videos, it actually pulls up a modified version of the YouTube site. Impressively, for YouTube Premium subscribers it detects this status and does not show ads.
Developer Christian Selig is transparent that this is not a fully native visionOS YouTube app. But he believes it provides a far better experience than trying to view YouTube in the Vision Pro’s Safari browser, which Google currently recommends. While it remains to be seen how Google will respond to a third-party YouTube app on the Vision Pro, Selig states he used no private or internal APIs in its development.
“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,” writes Selig.
The lack of official apps from YouTube, Spotify, Netflix and other big players is a glaring omission in the Vision Pro’s launch lineup. While Apple has provided developers a way to adapt iPad apps to the headset, Google and others have so far declined to take that approach. For those desperate to watch YouTube videos on their expensive new headset, Juno aims to fill that gap.
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