lambdasoup

It is quite unfortunate to announce that we had to unpublish Watch Later from Google Play today.

A couple of weeks ago we had to fill out an audio form regarding the YouTube client API usage of Watch Later. As a result Google shut down our API access. To our surprise, they actually forwarded us their internal report which came our of a manual audit. Some bean counter looked at the app and decided that it does not “improve the user interaction with YouTube”, resulting in a violation of ToS - specifically III.I.1. And yeah, those ToS are extremely broad so we will not try to challenge that, thus saving ourselves some sanity.

We are sorry for the roughly 1k users which we had constantly using our app for all those years. We originally built the app for us and used it regularly, so we will also miss it. The code will stay available at GitHub for anyone interested.

This day had to come since relying on anything from Google will eventually end in some sad way. Working with the YouTube API had been quite painful anyway and given how much time is wasted just keeping a really simple app up on Google Play we also have to worry about one less thing now.