Incognito is (Kinda) Broken in the YouTube App Store Builds
I recently watched a video on my iPad using the YouTube app and wanted to avoid getting related recommendations, so I briefly enabled Incognito. To my surprise, the option to disable Incognito had its text cut off in both landscape and portrait modes. Instead of displaying "Turn off incognito," it displayed "Turn o...incognito."
Today, I searched my YouTube history for a video I watched on my iPad and couldn't find it. I realized that even after tapping the "Turn o...incognito" button to disable Incognito, none of the videos I watched since were saved to my history. This appears to indicate that there might be two bugs:
- The call-to-action text to disable Incognito is truncated.
- Once Incognito is disabled, the app continues to behave as if it's still in Incognito by not saving watched videos on that device to the users history.
Software bugs are common, and teams often ship unintentional mistakes. If you're experiencing this issue, and found this via search, it's not you.
That doesn't change the fact that I am disappointed that one of the most popular and highest-grossing apps in the App Store hasn't properly implemented a privacy feature. It reflects a disregard for user experience and attention to detail. Given that I pay $23 per month for a YouTube family plan, this leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
I reported these issues via email to an iOS tech lead at YouTube, hoping they are aware and planning to fix them, as the second issue also occurs on iOS. As someone who has steadily reduced my reliance on Google products, I hope they make it a priority to deliver higher quality experiences to the Apple ecosystem one day.
Update 7/16/2024: I think I have a better understanding of why my watch history on iOS/iPadOS isn't updating.
I'm using AdGuard Home, and it turns out that s.youtube.com is being blocked by a filter. This blockage prevents YouTube's video history from updating on iOS devices. I confirmed this by disabling AdGuard, watching a YouTube video on the iPad app (making sure I wasn't in incognito mode), and seeing that the watch history updated as expected. When I re-enabled AdGuard, the videos I watched no longer appeared in the watch history.
Interestingly, watching a video on youtube.com in my browser on macOS with AdGuard enabled updates the watch history correctly. It seems YouTube's API implementation for propagating watch history may differ across platforms, causing unexpected behavior for those who modify their DNS rules. Given that up to 27% of people use some form of ad blocker, YouTube might have millions of impacted users. FWIW I suspect the % of ad block users is higher on desktop devices and significantly lower on mobile devices.
The truncated text on the iPad is still a bug. However, upon further investigation, it’s difficult to classify the watch history issue as a bug. Instead, the inconsistency in watch history propagation could potentially be improved by using a consistent API/domain across platforms, if that’s not already the case. If the API and domain are indeed consistent across macOS/iOS, it might be worth YouTube investigating whether the API calls made when enabling and disabling incognito mode on iOS are performing unique actions that could be getting blocked by network filters, such as making a call to something like s.youtube.com. Maybe the web behaves differently. I’ve shared this update with folks at YouTube and wanted to also reflect what I learned in this post in case others encounter perplexing watch history behavior on iOS.
