YouTube Has Quietly Fixed Its Annoying Apple TV Screensaver
Credit: Jesse HollingtonToggle Dark Mode
Some folks were unpleasantly surprised last month when they discovered the YouTube app had snuck a new screensaver into its tvOS app that overrode the one built into the Apple TV, but the good news is that it seems that Google has quietly reversed course and removed the invasive “feature.”
The problem wasn’t that YouTube had added a screensaver of its own, but rather that it didn’t tell users about it or give them a choice in the matter. There was no evidence that the YouTube app had even added a screensaver until it actually kicked in — something it was hard coded to do just before tvOS would detect an inactive app and start its own screensaver.
Since the YouTube app was still considered to be active while its screensaver was running, the Apple TV’s screensaver wouldn’t activate. To make matters worse, this also prevented the Apple TV from going to sleep, leaving the connected TV on for as long as the YouTube app was left open.
The timing also didn’t seem accidental. As I wrote last month:
From my testing, the YouTube screen saver kicks in at four minutes and forty-five seconds — 15 seconds before Apple’s default. That’s precise enough that it feels like a deliberate move on YouTube’s part.
With Google executives talking about ways to improve ad revenue on YouTube by showing ads on TVs while a video is paused (“a Pause Ads pilot on connected TVs,” Google’s Chief Business Officer called it), this raised concerns that pastoral landscapes were just the beginning of something much more annoying.
Fortunately, because the time limit was hardcoded and YouTube has no way of reading the Apple TV’s settings, it was possible to get around this by lowering the activation time of the built-in screensaver to two minutes, ensuring it would always beat YouTube’s to the punch.
To be clear, this was only an issue if you left the YouTube app open, but that’s not an uncommon scenario. YouTube is full of scenic videos with ambient sounds or music that people like to leave on in the background and sometimes even doze off to. Before this change, the Apple TV screensaver would kick in after the video ended, and the TV would eventually shut off normally. However, YouTube’s screensaver meant the screen would stay on until the user manually closed the YouTube app — potentially leaving their TV on all night.
The good news is that Google appears to have seen the error of its ways. According to Joe Rosensteel, who first reported the problem last month, the YouTube app’s antisocial behavior seems to have ended — and it didn’t even require a software update to do so.
As Rosensteel notes, there’s been no YouTube update since the screensaver first appeared, and even though Apple has released tvOS 17.5 in the interim, the YouTube app isn’t displaying the screensaver even in the original tvOS 17.4 configuration. I’ve also confirmed this on a 2021 Apple TV 4K running tvOS 17.4.
We can’t be sure, but Rosensteel’s theory that YouTube turned something off on the server side is the most likely explanation. Sadly, that means it may only be a short reprieve. The company could flip it back on once it’s ready to use it to serve ads. Let’s hope not, but we’ll have to wait and see.
