We’re not sure what’s going on over at Google but either incompetence or the trolling bug has seized control of operations. Last week we saw a purposeful redirect of maps.google.com send Windows Phone users to the search page instead of allowing them to use Maps (Google later backed down) and now today it’s affecting YouTube. The behavior is specific: head to m.youtube.com and click any video. In the past, such an action would launch Internet Explorer’s HTML5 video player, allowing Windows Phone users to watch just about everything that was mobile (assuming it wasn’t a Flash-only video). Now on Windows Phone 8 devices we get prompted to install an app.

While installing an app to watch a video may not seem like such a Herculean feat, we have to remember one thing here: we don’t have a YouTube app. Okay, technically we have the Microsoft YouTube player, which is just a front for the website, but the App prompt won’t actually reveal that. Instead, when a user clicks the “Search for app in the Store?” dialog box they are met with “Sorry, no apps found”. Best VPN providers 2020: Learn about ExpressVPN, NordVPN & more

Since as we mentioned the official Microsoft YouTube app is just a website wrapper, it exhibits the same behavior. The only opportunity users have would be to opt for a third party solution like Metrotube, SuperTube or PrimeTube. But when you search under ‘YouTube’ in the Store, those apps are slightly buried below some nonsense apps. So what’s going on here (Windows Phone 8)? As far as we can tell, the problem stems from Windows Phone 8 users using the default setting of Desktop Mode in Internet Explorer. Even though users can still navigate to m.youtube.com and view the mobile version of that site, videos simply will not play in that mode (on Windows Phone 7 devices where they don’t have the App Search ability, videos simply don’t play). Switching to the Mobile view in Internet Explorer appears to alleviate the problem. While that hardly seems like a terrible situation, it is causing confusion amongst users since the behavior has seemingly changed starting January 10th/11th for an unknown reason.



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