I feel like my 3GS was way better about resuming where I left off than any fancy new iPhone I’ve had in the past few years.

Big name apps like Facebook, YouTube, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts seem totally disinterred in preserving my place.

YouTube being the worst where I often stack a bunch of videos in queue, pause to do something else for a while and when I return to the app the queue has been purged.

YouTube will literally resume back to exactly where I was, then seemingly noticing that I switched back to it, go ahead and close the video I was watching. With all sorts of animations too, it's not just a case of having showed a cached screenshot. YouTube seems to intentionally forget where in a video I was, often after having been paused in the background for only a minute or two.

Why??

I feel like that's definitely a choice for Facebook at least - there's no technical reason the app couldn't remember at least the post you were looking at. I think they literally don't care if you were halfway through reading something when you flicked out of the app and go back in - refreshing the page and showing you all new stuff is probably measurably "better for 'engagement'" by whatever silly metrics they use.

Youtube/Google just make these shitty small annoying decisions just to make the iOS experience that little bit more annoying than it has to be.

Case in point — Youtube background play doesn’t pause when Siri makes an announcement, so if you’re listening to something you get two voices over each other.

I gave it the benefit of the doubt and figure it must be some kind of iOS thing, until I was listening to Audible one day and it paused automatically. So it’s just a google thing, not a third-party apps thing.

i have the same issue with the Youtube queue — this is something that could easily be persisted, but they just choose not to.

Brave is a very good YouTube app. You can download videos for offline viewing, build a local playlist of said videos, and bypass ads all in one go.

Too slow to edit. But also now playing just seems to go away after a while. Why isn’t this written to some nonvolatile place and just preserved? It feels like it must be on purpose but I wonder what the purpose is.

I find myself saving a ton of stuff to my Watch Later list, because I can’t trust the Back button when using YouTube. This issue exists on the phone, web, and AppleTV. YouTube just likes to randomly refresh everything. It’s the most annoying “feature”.

Even system apps like Photos have completely given up on state restore. I'm deep in an album comparing a photo to something on the web? Sorry, Safari needs all that RAM, Photos all is kicked out, and Photos can't possibly remember you were inside an album (despite, you know, all the APIs Apple specifically has to manage this [0]). They USED to care about these things and made it seamless enough that you weren't supposed to know that the the app was killed in the background, but they just don't seem to care anymore

[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/SwiftUI/restoring-...

Now is bad too, but my recollection is that the iPhone 3G-era task killer was EXTREMELY aggressive and required "tricks" to keep your state in the one app you could run

I feel like this might be intentional to a certain degree, at least on YouTube or Facebook.

If you switched off the app while looking at a certain post or watching a certain video, that's a negative engagement indicator, so the app wants to throw you back into the algorithmic feed to show you something new instead.

On a tangent how about those sweet app updates with patch notes reading bug fixes every week or so from the likes of Xiaomi and Anker weighing in at 600-700mb.

It's all gone to $hit, efficiency is gone it's just slop on top of more slop.