Just two days after Microsoft relaunched its YouTube app for Windows Phone smartphones and thanked Google for its “support”, Google has once again blocked the app from working.
The app had originally been removed from the Windows Phone store in May after Google complained to Microsoft about its ability to download videos to the device, as well as preventing video advertisements from playing.
Mobile is increasingly important to YouTube, accounting for more than 25% of its global watch time, and more than 1bn views a day.
In June, Wedge Partners analyst Martin Pyykkonen estimated that video ads shown on mobile devices could be generating as much as $350m of revenues per quarter for YouTube.
It relaunched this week, but now Google has blocked it again. “Microsoft has not made the browser upgrades necessary to enable a fully-featured YouTube experience, and has instead re-released a YouTube app that violates our Terms of Service,” a spokesperson tells The Verge.
“It has been disabled. We value our broad developer community and therefore ask everyone to adhere to the same guidelines.”Those prospects seem somewhat less hopeful now. Microsoft later published a longer blog post by its vice president and deputy general counsel, David Howard, explaining exactly why the app has been blocked again.
According to Howard, Microsoft bowed to Google’s wishes by re-enabling ads, removing the ability for users to download videos, and also stopping them from watching “reserved” videos on YouTube.
“There was one sticking point in the collaboration. Google asked us to transition our app to a new coding language – HTML5. This was an odd request since neither YouTube’s iPhone app nor its Android app are built on HTML5. Nevertheless, we dedicated significant engineering resources to examine the possibility. At the end of the day, experts from both companies recognized that building a YouTube app based on HTML5 would be technically difficult and time consuming, which is why we assume YouTube has not yet made the conversion for its iPhone and Androidapps.”
