Juno for YouTube on Apple Vision Pro (Source: Christian Selig)
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While YouTube itself is reluctant to create a custom app for Apple's new Vision Pro, the developer has done it for them with the help of Juno.
Google YouTube is among the streaming apps that won't be getting official native apps for the Apple Vision Pro. Instead, users of YouTube, Spotify, Netflix and others will have to use these services through the Safari browser.
However, independent developer Christian Selig created Juno, a third-party alternative YouTube viewer, and it is now available in the Apple Vision Pro App Store.
“YouTube is probably one of the parts of the internet that I use the most, so I was more than a little sad when YouTube announced that they had no plans to create a VisionOS app and disabled the ability to download app for the iPad,” Selig wrote on his blog. “The result is that you still have Safari and the website is fine, but it definitely doesn't feel like the VisionOS app.”
Selig was the app's developer Apollo Reader for Reddit: In 2023, Apollo was forced to shut down after Reddit introduced new fees that made it too expensive to run a reading app.
“Then I remembered that for years my old Apollo app was pretty good at playing YouTube videos posted to Reddit, and I had a pretty good understanding of how YouTube works,” he continues. “This gave me the idea to reuse some of the Apollo code and create my own little YouTube client for VisionOS. and after a crazy week of coding, Juno for YouTube was born.
“Does this feel like the perfect app for VisionOS?” He says. “Well, no, but it's a lot nicer than the website, and frankly, Google apps tend to do their own thing rather than use the iOS system UI, so I'm not sure we'll ever see the full extent of this.” .
Juno is available on the Apple Vision Pro App Store for $4.99.
