YouTube offline was announced in India long time back, but the company never took another step after that for developing countries. In September 2016, YouTube showed off its new concept to download offline videos and share them with friends.
This new app, YouTube Go, is finally available for download on the Google Play Store. Currently, the app has been launched only in India, considering it is a growing market and there are lots of users. The app promises extremely less data consumption, perfect for the Indian internet scenario.
Just like your regular YouTube app, YouTube Go also allows you to discover new videos, or watch videos from your subscriptions. However, this app allows you to preview videos before you decide to watch or save them. You can also control the quality of video you want to save offline for future viewing purposes.
“YouTube Go was designed and built from the ground up with insights from India, in order to bring the power of video to mobile users in a way that is more conscious of their data and connectivity, while still being locally relevant and social,” said YouTube product management VP Johanna Wright.
The ‘preview’ feature provides you quick snippets, like a GIF, from the video so that you judge the quality you want to keep. The app saves the offline video to your SD card, if any, or the internal memory directly. It has been developed keeping in mind that internet connection in developing countries like India, Brazil and Indonesia is patchy and not reliable everywhere.
The most interesting part is that you can share these videos with your family members and friends without using any data. You just have to pair the other smartphone with Bluetooth and you’re ready to send the video. The other person doesn’t have to download the video separately, thereby saving data.
The Google Play Store has the beta version of the app right now, which can be downloaded from here. It says ‘Unreleased’ because this version of the app is unstable and might have some bugs. The app itself is very light at just 8.5MB and works on Android JellyBean 4.1 and above.
The offline feature is really helpful and comes in handy when you lose internet connection on your smartphone. Daily public transport users would love the app for their journeys as it reduces data consumption and doesn’t rely on connectivity.
Interestingly, this app is available officially only in India right now and if you want to download it in other countries, you will need to sideload it!
Source: 9to5Google
