[canthonytucci]

I feel like my 3GS was way better about resuming where I left off than any fancy new iPhone I’ve had in the past few years.

Big name apps like Facebook, YouTube, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts seem totally disinterred in preserving my place.

YouTube being the worst where I often stack a bunch of videos in queue, pause to do something else for a while and when I return to the app the queue has been purged.

[mort96]

YouTube will literally resume back to exactly where I was, then seemingly noticing that I switched back to it, go ahead and close the video I was watching. With all sorts of animations too, it's not just a case of having showed a cached screenshot. YouTube seems to intentionally forget where in a video I was, often after having been paused in the background for only a minute or two.

Why??

[tzs]

See if turning off your ad blocker makes a difference. I've noticed that sometimes YouTube has parts of the site the apparently can look to ad blockers like they are part of an ad (maybe intentionally to annoy people with ad blockers?).

[mort96]

I'm talking about the YouTube app.

[post-it]

Likely some kind of complex refresh operation that kicks off when entering the foreground and takes a few seconds to complete before overwriting your state.

[ndarray]

translation: cancer

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

YouTube on TVs will often keep closed captioning on when switching accounts, then notice that CC is on and turn it off. Even though every account in the household always has CC turned on.

[stephen_g]

I feel like that's definitely a choice for Facebook at least - there's no technical reason the app couldn't remember at least the post you were looking at. I think they literally don't care if you were halfway through reading something when you flicked out of the app and go back in - refreshing the page and showing you all new stuff is probably measurably "better for 'engagement'" by whatever silly metrics they use.

[maccard]

It’s been a while since I worked for a bigger company (not meta) but the problem there was you would have a team who was responsible for feature A and a team responsible for feature B, and if there was any weird interop between the two it just never got resolved because there wasn’t an owner. There was no internal incentive to fix the problem. It wasn’t deliberate but it was structural

[al_borland]

I find myself saving a ton of stuff to my Watch Later list, because I can’t trust the Back button when using YouTube. This issue exists on the phone, web, and AppleTV. YouTube just likes to randomly refresh everything. It’s the most annoying “feature”.

[Fr0styMatt88]

Youtube/Google just make these shitty small annoying decisions just to make the iOS experience that little bit more annoying than it has to be.

Case in point — Youtube background play doesn’t pause when Siri makes an announcement, so if you’re listening to something you get two voices over each other.

I gave it the benefit of the doubt and figure it must be some kind of iOS thing, until I was listening to Audible one day and it paused automatically. So it’s just a google thing, not a third-party apps thing.

i have the same issue with the Youtube queue — this is something that could easily be persisted, but they just choose not to.

[bakugo]

I feel like this might be intentional to a certain degree, at least on YouTube or Facebook.

If you switched off the app while looking at a certain post or watching a certain video, that's a negative engagement indicator, so the app wants to throw you back into the algorithmic feed to show you something new instead.

[mcdeltat]

Conveniently, if you're watching a youtube video with an ad, switch apps and youtube reloads, you have to watch the ad again

[ssl-3]

You guys have ads on youtube?

[alpaca128]

Ad blockers don't work anymore, at least not with the version YT serves me. If it thinks that I have an ad blocker active (false positives happen too), it will only show a black rectangle and not even load the comments.

[ssl-3]

Strange.

On PC, I use Firefox with the uBlock Origin extension and I see no ads on Youtube.

Same with my pocket supercomputer: Firefox works great on Android, including for Youtube. And it uses extensions like the PC version does. No ads there, either.

On the BFT in the living room, I have a Google-manufactuered Google TV device. It runs SmartTube, and displays no ads on Youtube.

I even have an iPad that I use primarily for watching Youtube videos. For that, I stay completely within the confines of the walled garden and use Safari with the AdBlock add-on. And: If you're guessing that I'm about to write that have no ads on Youtube there either, then you're right. There's no ads on Youtube with that device, either.

Am I doing this wrong?

Maybe my perspective differs from that of some others, but it seems to all work very well for me here in 2026. (There's been some ups and downs with this over the years, but it all finds its way back to exactly what I wrote above, anyway.)

[alpaca128]

I also use Firefox with uBlock Origin. It worked flawlessly until some time this January. It happened with the switch to a new version of the video player which changed the design and behaviour. I'd be curious if you're still on the old version or something else is different.

Roughly in that timeframe YT also successfully blocked downloads with yt-dlp for a bit. Seems like they're trying harder now because of AI scrapers.

[user205738]

Also, if none of the methods helps: Google has completely remove advertising in YouTube videos in Russia.

So you don't even need an ad blocker, just a sponsor block.

By the way, this (Not an extension, but a login from a Ru ip's) removes ads from all other Google services.

[user205738]

try firefox, librewolf, waterfox, chromium. In these browsers I had ublock origin (lite for chromium), adguard and NoScript (And/Or Privacy Badger) on my phone and PC, I didn't see any ads at all. I use the unhook and enhancer extensions with them)

[recursive]

It's more common than you might think.

[canthonytucci]

Too slow to edit. But also now playing just seems to go away after a while. Why isn’t this written to some nonvolatile place and just preserved? It feels like it must be on purpose but I wonder what the purpose is.

[idle_zealot]

I assume the purpose of the Now Playing clearing after a while is the idea that when people start a "new session" with their device it should be "clean". Like, if Now Playing didn't randomly disappear then for most people it would always be on, indicating some paused music or podcast playback. It would also never give a chance for that elusive "start playing" experience that shows up in its place sometimes to recommend that I listen to one of four songs/podcast episodes.

[kalleboo]

Even system apps like Photos have completely given up on state restore. I'm deep in an album comparing a photo to something on the web? Sorry, Safari needs all that RAM, Photos all is kicked out, and Photos can't possibly remember you were inside an album (despite, you know, all the APIs Apple specifically has to manage this [0]). They USED to care about these things and made it seamless enough that you weren't supposed to know that the the app was killed in the background, but they just don't seem to care anymore

[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/SwiftUI/restoring-...

[christophilus]

Brave is a very good YouTube app. You can download videos for offline viewing, build a local playlist of said videos, and bypass ads all in one go.

[tomrod]

NewPipe as well.

[skhr0680]

Now is bad too, but my recollection is that the iPhone 3G-era task killer was EXTREMELY aggressive and required "tricks" to keep your state in the one app you could run

[nntwozz]

On a tangent how about those sweet app updates with patch notes reading bug fixes every week or so from the likes of Xiaomi and Anker weighing in at 600-700mb.

It's all gone to $hit, efficiency is gone it's just slop on top of more slop.