How To Use YTOpener to Open YouTube Links In The YouTube App On Your iPhone
With iOS 6, Apple ditched Google’s integrated YouTube client and Google responded immediately by launching it’s own third-party YouTube client in the App Store. The good thing in this is that this new app is even better than the old one we grew accustomed to. There’s a new interface that deffinitely looks better, there are features that weren’t present before in the old app and the video player does a good job in playing videos. We could even compare this player to the desktop one when it comes to quality.
The bad part with this new YouTube app is that it’s not integrated with iOS. Since the removal of the old one, iOS users cannot automatically open external links in the YouTube application and have to rely on copy/pasting the URL by hand. But don’t worry just yet. There’s a Cydia tweak called YTOpener that resolves this and allows one to automatically open YouTube links in the new YouTube app that Google put up on the App Store. Use this and your links will open in the new YouTube app and not in iOS’s Safari browser. If you’re still using the old YouTube app that came embedded in older versions of iOS, you can still make use of YTOpener as the links will be opened in the YouTube app currently installed.
You will need a jailbroken iPhone, a jailbroken iPad or a jailbroken iPod Touch to install and use YTOpener. You will also need Cydia installed and the BigBoss repo enabled. The application is free and once you have installed it you are ready to use it without needing to configure anything else. Test it by tapping on one of the YouTube links in your browser and these should open not in Safari but in the new YouTube app if you have this installed.
However great this application might be, it still has it’s limitations. Only proper YouTube links will open in the third party YouTube app and links that begin with “m.youtube.com” will still follow their normal behavior. You will receive a lot of YouTube links via your SMS application, sent by other users that have other devices. These links will start with m.youtube.com and you won’t be able to make use of YTOpener in loading them up. However, the developer of YTOpener has promised to fix this in a new release, so everything should be OK in the near future.
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