At the Behest of YouTube, Juno Has Been Removed From the App Store

Christian Selig:

For those not aware, a few months ago after reaching out to me, YouTube contacted the App Store stating that Juno does not adhere to YouTube guidelines and modifies the website in a way they don’t approve of, and alludes to their trademarks and iconography.

I don’t personally agree with this, as Juno is just a web view, and acts as little more than a browser extension that modifies CSS to make the website and video player look more “visionOS” like. No logos are placed other than those already on the website, and the “for YouTube” suffix is permitted in their branding guidelines. Juno also doesn’t block ads in any capacity, for the curious.

I stated as much to YouTube, they wouldn’t really clarify or budge any, and as a result of both parties not being able to come to a conclusion I received an email a few minutes ago from Apple that Juno has been removed from the App Store.

This, to say the least, sucks. Juno is a wonderful VisionOS app — one of the very best third-party apps for the platform. It turns YouTube video watching from a totally meh experience inside Safari into a totally wow experience as a native app. It’s not like Juno was keeping people from using YouTube’s own native app because, famously, there isn’t one. A YouTube spokesperson told Nilay Patel at The Verge back in February that “a Vision Pro app is on our roadmap”, but as I wrote at the time, “given the design quality and adherence to platform design idioms of Google’s iOS apps (poor), I’m not sure they’re even capable of making a Juno-quality app.”

I still stand by that. I don’t expect to see YouTube launch a native VisionOS app soon, and even if they do, I doubt it’ll be anywhere near as good as Juno. What I was obviously wrong about in that February post was thinking that YouTube wouldn’t care about Juno’s existence, given that Juno did not block ads. All it did was make the YouTube experience great on Vision Pro.

This makes Selig — one of the most gifted indie developers working on Apple’s platforms today — 2 for 2 on getting hosed by big platforms for which Selig created exquisitely well-crafted clients. (The first, of course, was his beloved Reddit client Apollo.) If he goes 3 for 3, Phil Schiller should grant him a “trifecta” lifetime exemption from App Store commission fees.

★ Wednesday, 2 October 2024