Youtube cached 1.5GB of data on my phone. Have we all forgotten how to code? Have endless hardware resources gotten the better of us?

No downloded content with yt premium btw

maybe it caches the profile images of the channels you've seen recently. And their recent videos thumbnails. Youtube is very fast.

companies don't respect customers' anything

developers probably bullied at companies until they don't care and have to make quick changes with little room for quality of life improvements

I built a pretty baller codebase then years later got hired by the same company. when they first replaced me my replacement said it was an amazing codebase, when they hired me again they kept saying they needed a refactor and I didn't even know what was going on in there. they didn't change any of my code. different developers just kept adding more and more code on top. I found a damned logger file and literally in the docs of this half finished logger file, which was not deleted and in production code, it said "whoops a logger already exists". wtf. yeah, I wrote that first logger. the project was like 60 files when I left it, you were too lazy to check if a logger already exists? 😒

and on it goes

To be fair, caching 1.5GB also means you just saved 1.5GB of data being transmitted over the internet, which is a much smaller bottleneck than memory.

I know what you're saying, but when it comes to performance optimization, you either sacrifice disk space for speed or the other way around.

On the other haaaand... 1.5GB sounds like it's probably mostly caching ads... that sounds like a lot of short video files... maybe the previews but most likely ads... getting 1.5GB of javascript, css and jpeg avatars seems unlikely to me...

Then again, if you ever been on a limited internet, you'll be thankful that this shit doesn't get pulled every time you open the app, otherwise that would eat through your limited link in minutes... So yeah. There's pros and cons to this thing

@Hazarth sounds like they should do a setting!

@jestdotty They totally should!

I think @Hazarth may be right, and that it might not be only ads. Maybe even the watched videos themselves, on a fast (i.e. uncompressed) format, that were downloaded to allow you to replay/pause/stop/move through the video without requiring the server to retransmit the same packages. Or to do anything, really.
It is not that devs got lazy, it is just that companies have somehow convinced you to pay for their infrastructure costs so that some of their products get to be "free" and some get to be obscenely profitable.
Heh, client-side generated html sounds like a great deal for the owners of web apps, and quite the hassle for the devs.

yes

@JsonBoa Lets store the entire webapp locally. So the use can access it offline and we have significantly less traffic to deal with. Genious!!!

Thanks, I still had youtube vanced on my phone with over 1 GB in cache. I would hope it at least contains videos I've watched multiple times, but I'm expecting it to contain something useless. Maybe all the video thumbnails I've ever seen?

@galena DRM.
Store the app on the user's device, make them connect and watch ads to get the keys to decrypt storage blocks (hardware-offloaded feature nowadays).
They get to keep the same number of active daily users on the server, for a tiny fraction of the traffic (if you measure it in bytes).
Back in the day it was called "pulling a XboX One". I think kids nowadays call this scam "the software industry".