When it comes to YouTube the waters are muddy. The YouTube app is just a client to a third-party web service (whose functionality falls outside of App Store rules); so in this case it can be argued that the "functionality" of the app is just the client functionality and not the content itself.
Furthermore you can skip ads on YouTube after a 5-second timer, so this seems reasonably fair, though I would still not install it and recommend everyone to just use the web with a content blocker extension (AdGuard) or a third-party frontend like Invidious (https://github.com/iv-org/invidious).
> Furthermore you can skip ads on YouTube after a 5-second timer
For me, that only really happens these days with mid-video ads (and even then it's happening less frequently despite the number of mid-video ads increasing.) Most of this week I've had double unskippable ads at the front of many videos and they're generally 60+ seconds combined.
I don’t know about where you live, it’s the most expensive streaming platform here. Not worth the money for occasional watching of things people share at work. Also seeing more unskippable ads lately and it’s incredibly annoying.
Can't skip the first ad depending on the length of the video you will get 2 in the middle and then at 30-40 secs left. It's made YouTube unwatchable for most stuff.
Rick Beato did a video talking about music license holders injecting more ads into his videos because he does stuff like Top 20 Rock Drummers of All Time. That requires him playing others' songs so they can inject more ads to earn from that video instead of taking it down.
Youtube has two offerings: an ad-free version of youtube, and a version that shows a whole bunch of live local (and national) tv channels. The latter is close to 5X the cost of the former and is, I suspect, what you are thinking of.
Google banning every ios and macos user from accessing everything from google.com
To their gmail to youtube is a completely foreseeable counter reaction if apple chooses to limit youtube due to ads.
Both companies will lose, of course, but Google has a hell of a lot more web traffic to its content than Apple does.
There is no way they can do so without attracting anti-trust scrutiny, not to mention Apple can deploy a very easy countermeasure by changing Safari's user-agent to Chrome's and playing cat & mouse regarding browser fingerprinting defenses.
That seems like a pretty big loophole if applied. Taken to the logical extreme, one could make an app that streams raw user inputs to a server and streams back a video output and be allowed to do whatever they like (albeit with horrendous performance).
They've thought of that loophole and closed it already ;-) Basically you can only stream from a device that is owned by the user/owner of the iPhone/iPad on the same LAN, and you should not use streaming to mimic a thin client of a cloud app. See rule 4.7.2 on Remote Desktop Clients.
(Note: this does not apply for "generic" remote desktop clients that are not intended to stream specific apps or services, such as the generic Microsoft Remote Desktop Client for iOS.)
Apple already declared a policy against game-streaming service apps; presumably specifically to avoid this loophole where the ads, purchases, etc. are happening “remotely” and so Apple can’t get a cut of them.
Presumably, if anyone tried to build a service for “streaming” non-game apps, that wouldn’t be allowed on the App Store either.
> Apple already declared a policy against game-streaming service apps.
I thought they did just the opposite?
4.9: Streaming games Streaming games are permitted so long as they adhere to all guidelines — for example, each game update must be submitted for review, developers must provide appropriate metadata for search, games must use in-app purchase to unlock features or functionality, etc. Of course, there is always the open Internet and web browser apps to reach all users outside of the App Store.
Because Google And Apple have come to an agreement. Same with Amazon and Apple as well as Amazon and Google (Youtube is finally on FireStick). Also it's not the size of the business but the value of your product and how much you are willing to give into the deal. Epic wanted to cut Apple completed out from IAP as well as get full OS level access with no Apple approval or supervision over the Epic Store that will be selling other developers apps. What kind of deal was that?
Furthermore you can skip ads on YouTube after a 5-second timer, so this seems reasonably fair, though I would still not install it and recommend everyone to just use the web with a content blocker extension (AdGuard) or a third-party frontend like Invidious (https://github.com/iv-org/invidious).