Up Close With Google’s New YouTube App

Google has launched a new iOS YouTube app, that is now available in the App Store as a free download by clicking here.

The announcement of a new YouTube app prior to the release of iOS 6 later this month, is not unexpected. As you may know, Apple decided to drop the YouTube App as a default app on iOS 6 going forward. In order to ensure users have an app, Google pushed out an iPhone and iPod Touch version of the YouTube app last night.

Note, there is no “universal,” iPad version available yet – but I expect that to come soon. One should also note that YouTube works nicely as mobile web site on all smartphones and tablets.

The features of the iOS YouTube app include:

1. More videos to watch: The YouTube iOS app has more videos including tens of thousands of official music videos.

2. Easier to find: A new swipe-out YouTube guide gives you instant access to your subscribed channels. New search tools give suggestions while you type, and let you search for videos or channels to find what matters to you.

3. More ways to share: You can now share videos on Facebook, Google+ and texts, as well as Twitter and email. You can also create and watch playlists of videos.

4. and much more…

Google tells us that about 25% of YouTube’s overall views are mobile, that is more than 1 billion mobile views a day. So mobile is obviously a very important market for Google.

I took a deep dive of the new app and here are some screen shots:

When you load the app, you are taken to the home screen with popular videos. There is an option to slide the screen to bring up the navigation:

The navigation slider looks like this:

Here you can navigate to videos by category, sign in and set your preferences.

If you sign in, the home page is personalized based on your viewing habits and subscriptions:

Search is obviously a prominent action at the top of the screen. Here are search results within the app:

You can even change your search preferences by hitting the gears icon:

Finally, when you are signed in, you can view your uploads, search history and much more: