YouTube Go is probably not an app that many of our American readers are familiar with, given its exclusive focus on the developing world, but it has been downloaded over 500 million times in its six years of existence. It is also dead. YouTube recently announced that the app will be shutting down this August.
With the shutdown of YouTube Go, YouTube cites an improvement in the main YouTube app as the main reason. The company says the core app has “improved performance for entry-level devices or those watching YouTube on slower networks.”YouTube says the main app also has “a better overall user experience [and] offers features not available on YouTube Go that many have asked for, such as the ability to comment, post, create content, and use a dark theme.”
The YouTube Go header feature to access videos offline is not mentioned in the community post. YouTube Go was actually a wild departure from the usual YouTube formula due to its focus on users with intermittent internet access. Even in 2016, Go users could download and save YouTube videos for later offline viewing. The idea is that if you didn’t have internet access at home, you could visit a place with internet and download videos for later.
In an attempt to make viral YouTube video sharing work without the Internet, you could even share these videos offline – the app could create an ad-hoc network between two YouTube Go devices, enabling local file transfers that were much faster than the Internet. Offline videos, of course, came with some DRM and self-destructed if you didn’t connect to the internet intermittently.
YouTube says the main YouTube app is powerful enough that “Go”is no longer required, but what about offline video features? It doesn’t look like they’re coming back. YouTube says it’s “creating additional user controls that help reduce mobile data usage for data-limited viewers,”but that doesn’t seem to be the offline use or sharing feature.
The main YouTube app does support offline video, but that feature is blocked by the “YouTube Premium”paywall, and it looks like the plan is to push this more aggressively to users.
The availability of offline videos for free through the Go app was a major blow to YouTube Premium ads, but now it looks like Google is “fixing”the issue.