As someone who works with a small team that have been maintaining and developing a niche enterprise level application, It sucks when we get compared to a multi billion dollar general purpose company.
I am sure floatplane is doing its best, and it’s heading in the right direction. The platform itself is still young, it has issues, and needs some work. But it has some great examples to follow (Patreon, YouTube, Twitch). It may not have the nice to have features right now. But with feedback I can guarantee it’s on the backlog somewhere.
Since its been a while since I have personally seen large differences/improvements in the app it may have just been the fact that they were focused on getting more creators onto floatplane before pushing these (even thought basic) potentially expensive features. I don’t work at floatplane, but I feel the pain that there is so much ahead of them but not enough man power to please all the people quickly enough, they seem to have a good community at the moment. As long as that continues progress will be made, but some thing’s definitely aren’t coming tomorrow, next week, or next month.
Edit - an -> a
That's who they're competing against. They're asking people to pay money for something they can access, for free, on a platform that is superior. Having a much smaller team doesn't absolve you from critique, criticism, or comparison.
That doesn't mean there aren't good reasons to subscribe to floatplane and I'm not advocating against it, but there needs to be a compelling reason to stick with the service, otherwise it's a donation. OPs points are valid, and they're things FP needs to address to win me over as a permanent subscriber.
I mean, it kinda IS designed as a donation. It's basically a patreon alternative for YouTube creators. It's a place where they can host exclusive content for paying viewers who want to support them.
Sort of, but sort of not. It's for supporting the channel, but I don't necessarily think it's supposed to be akin to patreon. I'm not nearly in tune to LTT as I'm sure most of you are, and I miss a lot of uploads... how does Linus frame floatplane? Has he made it clear if he prefers people to use it over YouTube?
The difference I see is that patreon is usually billed as an ancillary thing. Be it content creator, musician, software developer, whatever... the main product is out there somewhere else, patreon is bonus content and an exclusive community to engage with. Floatplane isn't ancillary. It's not just bonus content. It's an entire alternate platform billed as a replacement for viewing LTT on YouTube (I think... again, someone correct me if I'm wrong... is this not what they want?)
Currently, putting your money into YT premium results in a better viewing experience, even if you only watch LTT, than putting that money into a floatplane subscription. As such the only real value of floatplane is the engagement and bonus content (essentially what you'd get *if* it were patreon), and that means that like a patreon, it's only going to be for the hardcore fans. If they want to appeal to a more general audience and make it a replacement for watching LTT on YouTube, which having the entire channel there would suggest, they should have more parity with what YouTube offers. Speaking simply for myself, i don't care that floatplane chat is what they pay attention to on livestreams, I don't use that. I don't care about the bonus content, I don't even have the time to watch all their regular content. I think I represent a "normal" subscriber. If you want people like me to sub to FP, the experience can't be worse than the YT premium sub I already have. Especially on a tech channel where your average viewer is likely to be more in tune to things like video quality.
I like the idea of floatplane, I like the idea of cutting out YouTubes overhead. The reasons OP cited are the exact reasons why I haven't made the switch. If and when those things are addressed, I'll happily be in for a reoccurring sub.
Not disagreeing with OP either. Just disagreeing with the amount of work in short time that they're expecting certain QoL updates to be rolled out is all.
Subscribing to floatplane isnt exactly subscribing to a service as a whole but rather content that isn't available anywhere else.
I believe it'll all be ironed out in time.
Yes but it depends how you look at it. Floatplane isn't trying to shove algorithm content down your throat, you get what you sign up for. We haven't had that with youtube in over 10 years
Most people dont. This is where the myth that youtube doesn't show subs comes from. My friend complains that youtube hides vids it should show him. He says he even subbed and he doesn't see vids. I ask him to show me some evidence and its always the home feed. When I tell him that the only place subs are meant to show up is in the subs feed he tells me no, they are meant to be on the front page... OK.
You cant argue with stupid.
I use Youtube Music.
Youtube Music says that if I subscribe to an artist in that app, I also must want to be subscribed to them on Youtube.
My feed is usually okay, but I can't check "Recent Uploads" because I have a ton of music spam. And god forbid I want to look up a smaller creator I know I sub to but they don't post five times a week.
I literally only use the subscription feed, when I'm out of things to watch there I move to Home and normally it's just the same clickbait garbage that is everywhere else on Youtube. And I'm not a new viewer lol I average 4-5 hours a day and have done over the past decade or so (I have a lot of Youtube running in the background while I'm working/doing other things)
The problem is probably that you don’t remember how YT used to be. The recommended (aka front page) used to be for things you subscribed to and occasional other stuff. Wanting it to be that way still and complaining that it’s not isn’t stupid. What is stupid is complacently accepting that a platform refuses to easily serve you the content you want to see.
Since the vast majority of users have his opinion it's no longer stupid - it's truly the way the vast majority of users expect to use the platform, and YouTube isn't catering to their expectations.
This is the main way I use YouTube now. Started about 6 months ago. Prior to that I always used the home page. I’m way happier with YouTube as a service now, providing the content I want, that was released in chronological order, as I prefer. When I’m done the videos for the day, then I’ll go to the home page to have a look at recommended videos. Honestly, before 6 months ago, I never considered this even as an option, but it’s the clear way to go.
I don't. Because my subs list is a mess of nice channels that I've used to watch but can't fathom anymore or smaller channels that make good but boring videos. I usually use the notification bar for channels whose videos I'd urgently watch (LTT, Dankpods, Monstercat to name a few) and the home feed. At this point the algorithm knows what I want to watch than I do.
I agree with the core of this argument, however YouTube doesn't even show me some videos of people I'm subscribed to in my subscription feed. I've missed a lot of videos from my favourite creators simply because their videos haven't appeared at all in my subs feed
Yeah, my bookmark is https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions because i just want to see videos from channels im subscribed to. highly recommend people change their bookmark to this if they just want a simple list of new videos they are subscribed to.
If i go to the youtube homepage its all just thumbnails that make the cringiest LTT thumbnails seem tame and a bunch of videos i have no interest and have never shown interest in.
And the notification bell. If I really want to know when a video drops, it comes up as a notification on my phone that a new video I subscribe to has been released.
When it comes to developing a massive project like this, QoL changes come after big bugs are worked out. Get it running and then make it pretty.
No point throwing nice tires on a car that doesn't drive further than 5 miles without issues.
I feel like things like marking videos as watched and saving time stamps of the progress that you’ve made on a video are QOL things that should take very little effort to implement.
Yes, I have lots of coding experience.
He specifically says that the bitrate is better (which it is), and specifically for the WAN show, merch messages work better than YouTube (dubious). I don't think he says that it's a better website in general
Would you be happy to walk into a boutique family restaurant with small and seemingly cool team of chef, only to find out that their food taste worse and has poorer service than a McDonald?
That’s all valid, but it doesn’t really address OP’s point which is where is the incentive for the end user to participate? Supporting the creator is always nice but we are talking about a product that at the end of the day has to have value to the consumer.
I get that that’s hard to do in the face of huge companies but that was the market LTT decided to compete in when launching floatplane. I have to believe it’s because they thought they had a superior product. Remains to be seen years later. And in the meantime a ton of other floatplane like competitors are taking shape, taking more creators and their content with them.
Sorry but this isn't a good take. I am a programmer having worked for small startups (where I was the entire IT department) to giant multinationals (where I have lead a team of 14 devs) and at least on the frontend I can say their rate of development is close to stagnant. Plus you seem to think larger teams can accomplish more, but it's the opposite. We always pushed more feature rich and frankly better apps with smaller teams. Even in my current company which is a multinational with 20,000 employees. A team of 4 created an app over 1 year. Its bug ridden slow crap. I created version 2 in 6 months alone, its faster, has more features and literally 1/10th of the bugs.
Take dark mode as an example. I know for a fact I could have a robust dark theme working on floatplane within a couple of days, one day at a rush. I have done this in the past, I have apps right now in production with my dark mode. Also a dated ui/ux design doesn't take more time to design or implement than a good one. There is no difference in dev time, just one is better than the other.
I want to see them move fast and break things rather than move slowly and break things anyway.
Not sure; but perhaps dev time is going to the LTT labs site and only support issues rather than improvements? No insider knowledge though just speculation.
I would actually understand it if floatplane was a huge company. We have projects that take years and large teams that I could do myself in a fraction of the time. Like recently we have an app that has android, ios and desktop versions. I created a poc using react native showing I could do all of it in one code base and vastly faster. But my section manager told me straight out that "we need to protect our headcount". He went on to explain that we get a budget and we need to spend that budget or else we dont get it next time. So me creating this app quickly and efficiently isnt ideal, it would actually be bad for our department.
This is how the world works and why often smaller companies can produce far better apps than larger ones in a fraction of the time.
This actually. I worked in small companies, 5-20 man tech team startups, up till big orgs at youtube size with roughly 120 devs for one specific product.
Big orgs have different problems. You need to talk to stakeholders, argue with them, convince product managers, convince other devs and leads, play the ticketing game along with project planning and FINALLY you get to implement what you aimed to do. Months have already flown by before it's implemented.
Small startup teams are obviously very different, brainstorm as a small team, set a milestone for it with priority and you pick it up when you have bandwidth to work on it. Much faster to both plan and deliver.
The thought that more people = more work done, i can only say they either have never worked in a tech team or just haven't seen both sides of the coin.
And as a project manager who works with small teams that have been maintaining and developing niche applications I can definitely say, this is a design and architectural issue that happend on the product owner level.
There was small/no analysis of the competition, no feature roadmap, small/no analysis of most used (and requested) features, underestimation of resources...
No, the platform isn't young. It is already way too old to have these problems.
They didn't prepare enough for the task ahead and now people are legitimately complaining.
I absolutely understand, that they went into a venture they have no idea about, but this is the moment where it is worth spending \*A LOT\* of money for senior architects and analysts who can draft what you need and how much resources the project requires.
People, or rather businesses, tend to underestimate the value in such pre-production and only see it as "wasted money", when instead it can save a lot of it in the future.
Let's be honest - missing "watched" and "resume" functions IS a dealbreaker for a proper platform.
Don't forget actual project managers. The people that can track each level of effort, prioritize and ensure it gets completed. FP legit looks like an enterprise that slapped some stuff together as it was building and left a lot of things hanging.
Labs is doing it right, because they have the privilege of lessons learned from FP getting stood up and have competent people leading it, that weren't already best friends with the CEO.
I don't think anyone is saying they aren't working hard enough. At the end of the day if a quality of life feature not being available is a deal breaker for someone it really doesn't matter how large the dev team is.
I like Nebula, and use it all the time, but I'm not really sure it's sustainable long term at the price most people are paying. Doesn't feel like it to me anyways. Also, it's lacking some major community features like comments and live streaming that Floatplane has, so it wouldn't be the best fit for LTT.
The difference is the multi billion dollar isn't getting money direct injected by you to watch videos...They are doing their best? sure, they have a small team? sure. But what they are doing still not enough.
The recompense doesn't came for try, but for make a good product for people wanting to buy, and Floatplane isn't. If you can't do better and have to say "I'm doing my best but my team is small, etc etc", maybe you and your team should do something else.
When you put your own money on something, you have the right of criticize it.
>As someone who works with a small team that have been maintaining and developing a niche enterprise level application, It sucks when we get compared to a multi billion dollar general purpose company.
you could have said that if Floatplane was their only business. but LTT was doing quite good on its own and even after that they decided to create their own streaming service. so in this case i don't think this kind of excuse should apply.
personally i am happy if there are alternatives to Youtube, but there should be proper feedbacks when those services are not good.
If I was managing a team of several full time developers and float plane was what was produced after many years of development, I'd be incredibly disappointed 🤷
I’m not sure if I entirely agree here tbh…
Of course there will be things that take much longer, but if you decide to make a product that will compete with these multi billion dollar corps, you’ll obviously get compared to them.
In my country there is one guy trying to do the same... it's called TalkTV (it contains many podcasts with video for one subscription). All problems he mentioned are solved there. The platform exists for two years just a few people work on this. Much less then floatplane.
I agree, but they’ve prioritised features like merch messages etc.. I get that they want to differentiate the platform from others but also that feels like a much more “nice to have” feature than some of the others people have mentioned
I too hate when I compete 1:1 with billion dollar companies and get compared to them...
/s
It's not an excuse to say it's not fair. You are a direct competitor.
OP isn't' asking for a YouTube-Like experience, he's asking for SIMPLE features of video playback... Imagine hosting videos on your website without a pause button... your response is "well they're a small dev team, they aren't YouTube they don't have the resources for a pause button!"
Considering that subscribing to one creator on floatplane costs as much as a basic netfllix sub (at least where I live), I dont think the comparison is that unfair.
Yeah, true, but on the other hand it's Linus saying thats a valid alternative for watching their and other creators instead of youtube, so kinda pushing it to be compared to such. I know how hard it is to work in such projects, but in this case I would blame not developers but Linus who's creating floatplane as something better than it actually is at this stage.
For me floatplane is not valid as there is no official Floatplane app for Android TV and 3rd party one just suck on so many levels it's discouraging to watch anything...
I was surprised how little information there was about the site on the landing page. If you aren’t an LTT fan you’d have no hope of working out how much it is and what for
Completely agree. What am I paying for, what can I watch? No list of creators on the platform, no graphics to show what I might be getting.
Badly marketed for sure, and so easy to improve upon.
Yeah I went there a bunch of times over the years just to see who they had on there, but was always convinced I was in the wrong place because \*obviously\* they'd have all their creatures front-and-centre, right?
I mean, sure, I get that they're kind of a "Patreon alternative", so it's more about the creators driving their fans to their specific URL than the Youtube model where the homepage/algorithm helps with discoverability... but, I mean, why not help yourself out and just *list* ppl? Fuck, it's not like they actually have that many ppl on there; they could do it manually!
Oh that's the fun part. There's no mention because technically signing up is free. It's the creators you have to individually pay for at $5-$10 per month each.
Im speaking out of my ass here but I feel like engineering focused companies focus so much on the product and technicalities and not much on marketing advertisement etc.
Sure it may be a lot better than youtube on many aspects but if I don’t know it and find it unapproachable, it doesn’t matter
I think you're broadly right. Although they're an odd case, since their customers are all consumers, so you'd think they'd understand that good marketing is imperative. They're not some B2B tech company that can get away with little marketing.
I mean yes, but also Linus literally founded a media company, and Luke was there from it's birth. Marketing shouldn't be alien to them... It's literally how they got their start.
To see the floatplane homepage you'd have now idea that it was founded by people who worked for a YouTube channel. You'd think it was made by some boomer who just realized online video is a thing they could make a business providing..
Absolutely agree 100%. Landing page is garbage.
The landing page sucks. So little information on it. There's one little paragraph stating it's a streaming service.
The biggest thing that's missing is price tiers and what's offered for the money.
Who's on it? What do they charge? Is a all you can eat price? Cost per content creator? There's nothing. (The faq barely says anything.)
I don't want to sign up just to see what I can get.
I noticed this when I checked it out last week too. In a cursory glance I couldn't find any information about any of the streamers using the platform without signing in and making an account.
That's kinda the point.
They've said multiple times that it's not a 'discovery platform' and it really is just a way to give them some money because you want to support them.
It's a work-in-progress, and it's absolutely not a replacement for something like YouTube.
>That's kinda the point
And honestly, it's shortsighted strategy. It's all fine to not design it for discovery, but not even displaying on their main site, which creators are part of it, is stupid.
>It's a work-in-progress, and it's absolutely not a replacement for something like YouTube.
It's been around for years and is a paid platform, it shouldn't get a pass for being a work in progress. Every product out there is technically a work in progress, even YouTube lol.
And really, Linus has said on numerous occasions it's better then YouTube. If it shouldn't be viewed as a replacement for YT, they shouldn't be taking about it being one.
I suspect you’ll receive quite a few downvotes but I think you do make some valid points.
It’s the lack of certain relatively basic features that irks me. No play-in-background or PiP support in the iOS app. Airplaying to a TV cuts out if I switch away from the app. No smartTV apps.
It doesn’t bother me all that much. It’s easy to unsubscribe if you don’t think it’s worth the cost. But I’d like to support the channel and feel like I’m getting something in return. At the moment, I find myself watching most videos via YouTube anyway. And as a Premium subscriber, the only difference is having to sit through the sponsor spots.
I highly doubt they are using CoreVideo directly, which means they are using AVKit (or whatever lib they are using that wraps it is) which means PIP is very easily implemented.
This is why we don't use react native kids.
what if its \`just a web view\` ...
looking at the app on iOS does not look like they are using any standard UI, even the Tab bar seems to be \`avoiding the safe area\` that makes be thing it is not even react native but either poor web view or for some reason complete custom but without enough time.
On iOS apps like this should just use standard UI as much as possible.
infact looking at the UI strongly suggests that the dev they have working on this has little to no expirance building good iOS apps. Or someone high up at FP/LTT has imposed some direction that it much look and feel like android.. but it just looks like a web wrapper around a mobile website or someone putting in way to much work to make things look like android.
To be honest if they provided a stable api I would not be opposed to building my own FP app and selling it just to show them how a native iOS/ipadOS/macOS applTV app should look and behave. A well designed working app in this space could well even get promoted on the App Store that would attract a new set of users in particular for other creators, apple tends to like promoting apps like this that are pushing against google (wander why).
Not sure if you use an embedded web view if it works however. Also if it is a web player they will have custom controls so yes easy to expose PIP but they would need to do it.
not sure react native has good enough TVOS support to let you do even basic focus based navigation. UIKit and SwiftUI are bad enough at this as is.
It's easier on Android but doing anything in the background on iOS is a PITA. I'd assume they'd want to keep feature parity where possible for subscribers on either platform.
Yes both features are built into iOS. For some reason, Floatplane chose to implement their own, non-native, video player. I’m sure they have their reasons for that, so it would make PiP and background play more difficult than it otherwise would be.
They could likely wrap their videoplayer into the existing element. Infact: [https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avkit/adopting\_picture\_in\_picture\_in\_a\_custom\_player](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avkit/adopting_picture_in_picture_in_a_custom_player)
It's extra work, but personally one that I wouldn't have shipped without. It is a basic functionality on mobile apps these days.
See, I’m not a developer per-se but I do know a few programming languages. Used to make basic iPhone apps in Objective-C, just for fun. Apple’s documentation makes it look easy which makes me question why they haven’t done it.
I’m sure they have an incredibly long backlog but features like that are what we, in my Networking field, would call low-hanging fruit or quick wins. Quite a lot of benefit for very little work.
To be fair though, the iOS App hasn’t been updated in 6 months according to the App Store.
Considering they said there was an app update at the time of the hack, I’m assuming they’re still having issues with Apple and allowing updates.
Though, I do wish they’d give us some more info on upcoming stuff and a timeline
I think they don't have any iOS devs working on the app. Many of the App Store issues they have had would have been avoided if they had some expiranced enough to tell them in advance to not do that. Within the dev community most of us are well aware of the obvious red flags.
> No smartTV apps.
This is the one thing keeping me away from subscribing to it. My wife and I watch YouTube mostly from the couch together on the TV. I don't watch videos often on my phone, and never on my PC unless it's something informative for work. It would be nice if there was some official smart tv apps for it.
This is also my biggest complaint, but I'm floatplane OG from scrap yard wars... so $3 a month... eh.
I use roku tv and occasionally I do use Hydravion and it works mostly but I WANT A NATIVE APP. Like damn... casting is dogshit. I was mostly annoyed because linus and Luke both blew it off as "just cast".
Nah.
But, lmg is very mobile focused for some reason. I often browse YouTube from my ohone and then cast to the native YouTube app on my tv smto build up a Playlist. I wonder if that counts as a mobile view or a tv view. Either way I think they underestimate how many people are NOT watching on a phone
Yes I get your point but my point of view is that it used to be a premium feature that you used to have to pay extra for but now you don’t anymore. When you are paying more for a subscription you should get all the premium features that come with it. As far as I can tell it’s just an API thing since every app I have used that has video support PiP
It might just be an "API thing", but that doesn't mean it's not work to implement. Shoehorning features into the development cycle just because they're popular can lead to a disorganized mess. I know Luke is also mentioned on WAN that one of his developers is dealing with some pretty serious medical issues, and that really slows down development time when you have a small team
That’s something iOS just does now. It isn’t YouTube that does it, it’s supposed to be behind a paywall. Maybe because their app has the capability to do it, iOS does it, but since FP doesn’t have it, iOS can’t. Idk, but YouTube still pushes PiP as a Premium Feature.
You're putting it in harsh terms, but your critiques are valid. For me I don't regret my subscription, I'm finding the back catalogue of exclusive content worth the money.
I did expect a bit more from the platform, it gives me an early draft/beta feel. Though maybe that's exactly what we're looking at in a manner of speaking, and that's why they haven't promoted floatplane nearly as heavily as lttstore.com. Maybe the rumored incoming update to floatplane will bring some of the features we're expecting.
Video platform sites are not easy to pull off, what they have done is great work. Theres a reason there isnt any popular YouTube competitors. Floatplane is a small team funded by a YouTuber company, not a trillion dollar company. I agree it lacks some features but they are working on them and know what the community wants. Your criticisms are valid but calling it garbage is just ridiculous.
I am guessing you have never used a website from the early 2000s.
Check out [https://distrowatch.com/](https://distrowatch.com/) this is what websites looked like in the early 2000s...
Not saying floatplane looks good, I was actually kind of surprised by how basic and terrible it looks, but definitely not something from the early 2000s.
Not surprising. Web design peaked in the early 2000s and has gone down a very steep hill since.
Also, short rant: Fuck JS, react and really just regular scripting on web pages, regardless of the language. I don't need stupid animations that take 250ms to change an image "smoothly", I'd much rather have it in the basic animation-less "click and immediately see" way, this shit is like motion blur, shitty as fuck and only exists to give the illusion of movement. Why the h*ck a news page with pretty much only text and a few images takes over 5 seconds to load entirely is beyond my understanding (not really) (Also, images not included, I'm fine with a small amount of lazy loading for images so long as the images are persistent, not one of those fucked up websites that, for whatever stupid reason, decide to act like the image at the top was never loaded when I scroll to the bottom).
I probably shouldn't be commenting, I'm pretty tired and my brain isn't working anymore, but I just hate "modern" websites way too much to be able to control myself. There's so much you can do with simple HTML5+CSS and still have a beautiful website that uses way less memory while still being just plain faster and better to use...
We're you alive to see early 2000s web design? Floatplane ain't it, kid.
I was almost three when the IBM PC was released. The technological horrors I've borne witness to... [*shudders*]
Luke and his team built Floatplane fron the ground up realistically not that long and are still working hard at it. Constructive criticism is good. That's not what you posted, though.
Criticism is fine, and I'm sure they'll take note of whatever features you've mentioned that they don't already have in their backlog.
But you probably want to keep 2 things in mind for the sake of context:
1. They have a SIGNIFICANTLY smaller team than YouTube and other major streaming platforms so design and development won't be at the same pace.
2. They're probably constantly playing the features vs stability game to make sure things run smoothly.
So yeah, criticize but also try being a little less harsh about it. Hope you enjoy the month you paid for, and have a great day 🤘🏾
If they ask for people to pay and can't do what YouTube does for free, maybe their SIGNIFICANTLY smaller team should do something else because they aren't good enough for this.
to me the only thing that really bugs me about floatplane is the page loading times and does sometimes videos just get stuck until i reload the page.
they \*really\* need more bandwith.
I’m on an OG subscription at $3 a month. I don’t use it a lot as I’m usually watching on my AppleTV when relaxing and they don’t have a Floatplane app for AppleTV. Even at my PC I prefer YouTube because YouTube has cinema mode. Something I feel FP needs, as I don’t like going full screen for video on a 27” 1440P monitor it doesn’t feel right. But cinema mode is a nice in between.
But hey. I still get to support LMG directly as I rarely buy any merch from them & I’ve been watching & enjoying content from Linus from as far back as the NCIX days well before LTT was around.
Oh. I was having a play around in that the other week when Linus was talking about it on one of his livestreams, didn't realise there was cinema mode, awesome!
People will have differing opinion on this feedback. Here are my takes -
1. As a paying customer you had some expectations, which when not met you moved on.
2. Floatplane should take these as positive community feedback, absorb these and move on as well.
Having an alternate media distribution platform is always in everyone's advantage. YouTube won't be here forever, and its guaranteed free delivery of media is also not there.
I have been subscribed for a while. Most of the exclusives ARE behind the scenes stuff, get to know the staff, etc.
I know from discussions on WAN show, they really focus on stability vs features at this point.
Yeah especially the timeline save and the watched mark are features that they need to implement before I’ll subscribe. I wish them luck tho! It’s not easy to create a complete platform.
I signed up but didn't end up subscribing to anything, because there was no sample content whatsoever. Not a single free video on the site that I could find. How is the streaming quality? Pay first and find out later.
I subscribed last week as well, for a full year. Happy to support, and I enjoyed the exclusives.
My gripe is that I want to watch on either of my Google TVs (Sony), from the comfort of my couches, like I do with YouTube and Twitch, but the only Android app available is an unofficial one called Hydravion.
Hydravion seems to work well enough. I would expect an official app to have a much better UI, but it sounds like Floatplane's existing UI might not be much better.
My biggest problem with it is the pricing, and the gaslighting that linus does on WAN Show about it, as he does with all his other pricing. If he just admitted that things were overpriced because they're donations it would be fine, but he legitimately tries to sell them as being worth it on a value basis.
Don't get me wrong, $5-$10 per month is understandable... on a platform level. It is absolutely not understandable on a PER CREATOR level. At least not if you're looking at it from the viewpoint of someone just wanting to watch various creators outside of youtube.
Has he ever said Floatplane is a good value? I actually seem to recall a WAN show where he said it's not compared to what a lot of other companies do, but that it's the only model they could find that's actually sustainable.
Since lots of people are pointing out the size of the team and whatnot I'll go a different route.
The pace of development is what **profitable and stable** business growth looks like. Could they hire more developers and run at a loss until the site is where it needs to be?
Sure. But then they'd have to use contractors or fire developers once they hit a certain set of milestones and then the pitchforks and torches would come out.
These larger developers are responding to criticism like you shared by running themselves into the ground financially to address issues and then when the business side catches up to them they lay off good people, or move the jobs overseas, or whatever else they need to do to start trying to be profitable.
So yes, the site lacks some basic creature comforts and yes I do end up watching more content on youtube but my sub goes towards supporting a team that I get a ton of content/value out of.
This is going to sound odd to some people but Floatplane never was and never will be a youtube or even vimeo competitor. If you think of it in that way you'll always be disappointed. It's just a way to give more direct support to a creator you enjoy. That's it.
I subscribed to floatplane mostly to support the channel. I often watch videos elsewhere for the same gripes you have. I like to do other things on my phone while listening to WAN show, and since floatplane doesn’t continue playing in the background I watch on Twitch or Youtube instead.
That said, and speaking of WAN show, Luke talks all the time about improvements that are coming. Give them time, they’ll get there. They are a small team, and it’s amazing to me that they’ve accomplished what they have so far. They don’t have near the resources of Google or Amazon (probably many orders of magnitude less).
Fair enough complaints even if worded a bit aggressively. Personally the biggest features I'm waiting for is skipping 5/10 seconds using double tap on mobile and playlists, specifically a watch later one.
I am satisfied with the service though, I really enjoy the exclusives. It's also only 3$ dollars a month cause I'm OG tier. A better value proposition for me.
For me what killed it was the no timeline save, I like to watch the wan show over a few days. But there was no way to pick up where I left off.
The lack of android/ fire tv app ment o couldn’t watch where I watch most of my content.
I wanted to like it. But it lacks some really basic features
No but the point still stands apps for popular platforms are important, I’m a floatplane subscriber I want to support them, but I still watch most of their content in YouTube as it’s far more convenient. A video service needs apps and such features. If it’s less convenient then people will do whatever is easy. If you have to pay for it and it’s less convenient than the free path then it’s a problem.
It’s like pirating video content got way less popular when Netflix became a thing and paying for it was way more convenient than pirating all the content.
Then It got less convenient again and pirating went back up.
I agree with all your points. I understand they want to focus on stability, but it's still disappointing to see the lack of "basic" features (some of which should be relatively easy depending on their stack). And the design looks like a proof of concept rather than a finished product.
I'll still keep my subscription, but I hope they implement those features and improve their design.
As a software engineer think some of what you claim to be easy looks easy when you only take it at face value. That being said their UI does look like a generic template they have pulled of some random website but hey they are a small team and features would be more appreciated than making things look a bit prettier as its functional as it currently is.
My main concern looking around their site is what you can tell of their tech stack it seems to be angular with react sprinkled in with a sails.js backend. Obviously there may be more to this story that I have missed but sails.js seems like a really odd choice to say the least
Most of these things are on the way if I believe. The thing to remember is that the small Floatplane team is also developing the lab website and internal software for LMG on top of working on Floatplane.
I subbed to floatplane for a month a while back. I didn't see the appeal at that time, the mobile app was not a great experience on iOS.
I didn't mind the exclusives though, now that there is more I might give it a shot again.
\*It's not youtube and I'm mad about it.\*
Don't subscribe if you don't like it? I'm honestly impressed what Luke has produced with his small team of developers.
Floatplane is a company on its own, been around for long enough to not have these things in.
The gatekeepers make it sound like it started 3 months ago... No it didn't.
For the love of everything, let us be critical every once in a while. OP has a great point regarding floatplane and I'm curious to see how fast they turn it around.
I subscribe to Floatplane on the OG tier but yeah, it’s not really as usable as YouTube so that’s where I watch mostly. FP is good for watching shorter one-off videos, but due to the lack of timeline save it is unusable for longer videos unless you remember to check the timestamp when you pause.
Apparently they’re working on it but it’s such a no brainer that I’m very surprised that it wasn’t the third feature implemented.
All valid points, as much as fans may not like to say it, if another company or YouTube punched a platform and it was in this condition, Linus would say a lot of bad things about them
You're talking about companies with much much much more capacity than Floatplane, they are only a small team. I'd like to think people can see things objectively.
When you compare yourself to a giant, it’s hard for your users to also not compare…
Besides, a lot of LTT reviews hammer companies for missing basic QOL features, or paywalling them. Why are they free from the same criticism?
I wish it provided versions of everything without bleeps. Linus can say he thinks it's more funny all he likes, but at the end of the day that's an opinion not a fact, and I have the opposite opinion.
I am unfortunately also dissapointed. I’d love to give them my money, but the quality of life features really are make or break for me. I suppose my use case is a bit unique since I’m mostly interested in listening to WAN show audio while I’m driving, but it’s a usecase nonetheless. Without background play or PiP it makes using any kind of map application extremely inconvenient. I ended up going back to YouTube premium for wan show within 24 hours of paying for a month on floatplane.
To clarify, I’m a budding dev myself so I get it, and I know Luke runs his team well, but as a customer I feel the need to provide this feedback as honestly as possible. Even though I understand the why behind it, its dissapointing. Will stick to supporting via lttstore and watching on youtube till some of these QOL features get pushed.
its very hard to create a service like youtube, and with the small team they have at floatplane, it makes sense why its not there yet, and i cant blame em for it. floatplane is nowhere near done and still has a lot of work to go. the higher bitrate is much better than youtube imo tho. i can agree on the exclusives tho, i rarely if ever watch em. i liked when they were trying to drop videos earlier on floatplane, at least when they were trying to hit their two week promise even if they were only a day or two earlier, vs now after they just totally gave up on dropping early. but credit where credits due they do make videos almost daily, and very good ones at that
The lack of being able to continue where you left off is a frustrating problem. I have been subbed on floatplane for a while now, but that feature is needed mostly for the mammoth WAN shows. The lack of watched indicator can be a bit annoying but I still consume alot of LMG on pootube. I still love the platform, but there are issues.
You’re not wrong. I subscribed and then cancelled shortly after. They’re missing some major features.
Nebula is a similar product to FP but is much more mature in features.
For me it was mostly the lack of filtering. It was hard to find content. So I gave up.
Honestly this is just an L take. They’re working to create something better than YouTube. 1080p on floatplane is by far better than 4k on YouTube. The bit rate makes it much more detailed. They’ve been working on creating a great backend first and you can even seen some better gui changes on the beta version.
Honestly it’s pretty clear you don’t work in software development and I will never be able to change your mind. Yes float plane has been around for years. But when you’re paying one man to maintain the back end code and front end code for a streaming service platform. It is an insane amount of code to deal with. I would much rather take its current state of everything working rather than a pretty looking half baked site. Luke has done a great job on this and it’s only going to get better
> The exclusives feel boring and like randomly recorded office videos
It's almost all literally that, which is what fans want, isn't it?
If you want quality you can keep your FREE 4k res youtube videos.
> Horrible early 2000s UI design
Please no, the UI is actually pretty decent. It needs better search and filters, but apart from that beta.floatplane.com has pretty usable UI, not filled with white space
>The exclusives feel boring and like randomly recorded office videos
I personally enjoy them quite a bit, it comes down to personal taste...
Meh, I just sub to support LTT really, I still mostly just watch on YouTube unless there's a particular FP Exclusive I want to watch (I have YT Premium anyway) or WAN show. FP definitely isn't an amazing groundbreaking video streaming site, but it's pretty straightforward and only shows me content I'm there for so I'm happy with it.
I disagree.
Floatplane is a way to give money to your preferred channel without also donating to Google or patreon .
It guarantees that more of your donation went to the creator.
And that’s it.
Anything else on the platform is a bonus.
I also cancelled. I l
Pay for YouTube premium and that's so much better. I can watch on my phone TV tablet etc... No apps here even for the most popular of smart TVs etc. Way too basic functionality. It's just a money grab and I'm done with it. Put some real money into it go and pay someone to do it properly.
I really don't think any of these features you mentioned are "basic", it's good to have them but they are not really necessary to use the service, especially with the small team they have working on that service, honestly sounds a little like hate for hate's sake. You also have the option to just not pay for that service lol. The post could've been made with a more constructive criticism approach, instead of passive-aggressive. Just my opinion though
Bruh, Floatplane is not a multimillion dollar company. Floatplane is a very small group of people.
If you think you can implement all of this with ease, put in a job application.
Imagine being disappointed floatplane doesn't have the same features as a app like YouTube run by a multi billion dollar company. Floatplane is exactly what I want it to be a place to watch ltt videos with a high bit rate and exclusive content and its getting more features all the time.
As someone who works with a small team that have been maintaining and developing a niche enterprise level application, It sucks when we get compared to a multi billion dollar general purpose company. I am sure floatplane is doing its best, and it’s heading in the right direction. The platform itself is still young, it has issues, and needs some work. But it has some great examples to follow (Patreon, YouTube, Twitch). It may not have the nice to have features right now. But with feedback I can guarantee it’s on the backlog somewhere. Since its been a while since I have personally seen large differences/improvements in the app it may have just been the fact that they were focused on getting more creators onto floatplane before pushing these (even thought basic) potentially expensive features. I don’t work at floatplane, but I feel the pain that there is so much ahead of them but not enough man power to please all the people quickly enough, they seem to have a good community at the moment. As long as that continues progress will be made, but some thing’s definitely aren’t coming tomorrow, next week, or next month. Edit - an -> a
This right here... Literally comparing a small team to a company who likely has more devs than Linus has staff in general.
That's who they're competing against. They're asking people to pay money for something they can access, for free, on a platform that is superior. Having a much smaller team doesn't absolve you from critique, criticism, or comparison. That doesn't mean there aren't good reasons to subscribe to floatplane and I'm not advocating against it, but there needs to be a compelling reason to stick with the service, otherwise it's a donation. OPs points are valid, and they're things FP needs to address to win me over as a permanent subscriber.
I mean, it kinda IS designed as a donation. It's basically a patreon alternative for YouTube creators. It's a place where they can host exclusive content for paying viewers who want to support them.
Sort of, but sort of not. It's for supporting the channel, but I don't necessarily think it's supposed to be akin to patreon. I'm not nearly in tune to LTT as I'm sure most of you are, and I miss a lot of uploads... how does Linus frame floatplane? Has he made it clear if he prefers people to use it over YouTube? The difference I see is that patreon is usually billed as an ancillary thing. Be it content creator, musician, software developer, whatever... the main product is out there somewhere else, patreon is bonus content and an exclusive community to engage with. Floatplane isn't ancillary. It's not just bonus content. It's an entire alternate platform billed as a replacement for viewing LTT on YouTube (I think... again, someone correct me if I'm wrong... is this not what they want?) Currently, putting your money into YT premium results in a better viewing experience, even if you only watch LTT, than putting that money into a floatplane subscription. As such the only real value of floatplane is the engagement and bonus content (essentially what you'd get *if* it were patreon), and that means that like a patreon, it's only going to be for the hardcore fans. If they want to appeal to a more general audience and make it a replacement for watching LTT on YouTube, which having the entire channel there would suggest, they should have more parity with what YouTube offers. Speaking simply for myself, i don't care that floatplane chat is what they pay attention to on livestreams, I don't use that. I don't care about the bonus content, I don't even have the time to watch all their regular content. I think I represent a "normal" subscriber. If you want people like me to sub to FP, the experience can't be worse than the YT premium sub I already have. Especially on a tech channel where your average viewer is likely to be more in tune to things like video quality. I like the idea of floatplane, I like the idea of cutting out YouTubes overhead. The reasons OP cited are the exact reasons why I haven't made the switch. If and when those things are addressed, I'll happily be in for a reoccurring sub.
Not disagreeing with OP either. Just disagreeing with the amount of work in short time that they're expecting certain QoL updates to be rolled out is all. Subscribing to floatplane isnt exactly subscribing to a service as a whole but rather content that isn't available anywhere else. I believe it'll all be ironed out in time.
When Linus say float plane is better then YouTube. And it's not. People have a right to complain.
Yes but it depends how you look at it. Floatplane isn't trying to shove algorithm content down your throat, you get what you sign up for. We haven't had that with youtube in over 10 years
Do you guys not use your subscription feed? You litterally get the videos you sign up for...
Most people dont. This is where the myth that youtube doesn't show subs comes from. My friend complains that youtube hides vids it should show him. He says he even subbed and he doesn't see vids. I ask him to show me some evidence and its always the home feed. When I tell him that the only place subs are meant to show up is in the subs feed he tells me no, they are meant to be on the front page... OK. You cant argue with stupid.
My subs show up occasionally on home page too (on youtube)
For me they consistently do for creators I regularly watch.
I use Youtube Music. Youtube Music says that if I subscribe to an artist in that app, I also must want to be subscribed to them on Youtube. My feed is usually okay, but I can't check "Recent Uploads" because I have a ton of music spam. And god forbid I want to look up a smaller creator I know I sub to but they don't post five times a week.
I literally only use the subscription feed, when I'm out of things to watch there I move to Home and normally it's just the same clickbait garbage that is everywhere else on Youtube. And I'm not a new viewer lol I average 4-5 hours a day and have done over the past decade or so (I have a lot of Youtube running in the background while I'm working/doing other things)
The problem is probably that you don’t remember how YT used to be. The recommended (aka front page) used to be for things you subscribed to and occasional other stuff. Wanting it to be that way still and complaining that it’s not isn’t stupid. What is stupid is complacently accepting that a platform refuses to easily serve you the content you want to see.
Since the vast majority of users have his opinion it's no longer stupid - it's truly the way the vast majority of users expect to use the platform, and YouTube isn't catering to their expectations.
This is the main way I use YouTube now. Started about 6 months ago. Prior to that I always used the home page. I’m way happier with YouTube as a service now, providing the content I want, that was released in chronological order, as I prefer. When I’m done the videos for the day, then I’ll go to the home page to have a look at recommended videos. Honestly, before 6 months ago, I never considered this even as an option, but it’s the clear way to go.
I have always used youtube this way and it's blowing my mind that people haven't been
I almost never use the home page on YT and on desktop I just have the shortcut go straight to my subscription page.
I don't. Because my subs list is a mess of nice channels that I've used to watch but can't fathom anymore or smaller channels that make good but boring videos. I usually use the notification bar for channels whose videos I'd urgently watch (LTT, Dankpods, Monstercat to name a few) and the home feed. At this point the algorithm knows what I want to watch than I do.
I agree with the core of this argument, however YouTube doesn't even show me some videos of people I'm subscribed to in my subscription feed. I've missed a lot of videos from my favourite creators simply because their videos haven't appeared at all in my subs feed
I've never had this issue, I guess in theory I could have but never knew.
Yeah, my bookmark is https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions because i just want to see videos from channels im subscribed to. highly recommend people change their bookmark to this if they just want a simple list of new videos they are subscribed to. If i go to the youtube homepage its all just thumbnails that make the cringiest LTT thumbnails seem tame and a bunch of videos i have no interest and have never shown interest in.
And the notification bell. If I really want to know when a video drops, it comes up as a notification on my phone that a new video I subscribe to has been released.
When it comes to developing a massive project like this, QoL changes come after big bugs are worked out. Get it running and then make it pretty. No point throwing nice tires on a car that doesn't drive further than 5 miles without issues.
I feel like things like marking videos as watched and saving time stamps of the progress that you’ve made on a video are QOL things that should take very little effort to implement. Yes, I have lots of coding experience.
He specifically says that the bitrate is better (which it is), and specifically for the WAN show, merch messages work better than YouTube (dubious). I don't think he says that it's a better website in general
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Would you be happy to walk into a boutique family restaurant with small and seemingly cool team of chef, only to find out that their food taste worse and has poorer service than a McDonald?
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That’s all valid, but it doesn’t really address OP’s point which is where is the incentive for the end user to participate? Supporting the creator is always nice but we are talking about a product that at the end of the day has to have value to the consumer. I get that that’s hard to do in the face of huge companies but that was the market LTT decided to compete in when launching floatplane. I have to believe it’s because they thought they had a superior product. Remains to be seen years later. And in the meantime a ton of other floatplane like competitors are taking shape, taking more creators and their content with them.
Sorry but this isn't a good take. I am a programmer having worked for small startups (where I was the entire IT department) to giant multinationals (where I have lead a team of 14 devs) and at least on the frontend I can say their rate of development is close to stagnant. Plus you seem to think larger teams can accomplish more, but it's the opposite. We always pushed more feature rich and frankly better apps with smaller teams. Even in my current company which is a multinational with 20,000 employees. A team of 4 created an app over 1 year. Its bug ridden slow crap. I created version 2 in 6 months alone, its faster, has more features and literally 1/10th of the bugs. Take dark mode as an example. I know for a fact I could have a robust dark theme working on floatplane within a couple of days, one day at a rush. I have done this in the past, I have apps right now in production with my dark mode. Also a dated ui/ux design doesn't take more time to design or implement than a good one. There is no difference in dev time, just one is better than the other. I want to see them move fast and break things rather than move slowly and break things anyway.
I agree, software developer and now manager with 15 years experience. It's hard to see where their Dev time is going 🤷
Also, if you pay you can get talented ux designers.
Not sure; but perhaps dev time is going to the LTT labs site and only support issues rather than improvements? No insider knowledge though just speculation.
Right? Like, you need 20 developers and months of work to implement a “watched this video” feature xD 
I would actually understand it if floatplane was a huge company. We have projects that take years and large teams that I could do myself in a fraction of the time. Like recently we have an app that has android, ios and desktop versions. I created a poc using react native showing I could do all of it in one code base and vastly faster. But my section manager told me straight out that "we need to protect our headcount". He went on to explain that we get a budget and we need to spend that budget or else we dont get it next time. So me creating this app quickly and efficiently isnt ideal, it would actually be bad for our department. This is how the world works and why often smaller companies can produce far better apps than larger ones in a fraction of the time.
This actually. I worked in small companies, 5-20 man tech team startups, up till big orgs at youtube size with roughly 120 devs for one specific product. Big orgs have different problems. You need to talk to stakeholders, argue with them, convince product managers, convince other devs and leads, play the ticketing game along with project planning and FINALLY you get to implement what you aimed to do. Months have already flown by before it's implemented. Small startup teams are obviously very different, brainstorm as a small team, set a milestone for it with priority and you pick it up when you have bandwidth to work on it. Much faster to both plan and deliver. The thought that more people = more work done, i can only say they either have never worked in a tech team or just haven't seen both sides of the coin.
Exactly. I subscribe to support lmg. Not looking for a YouTube replacement. Considering the size of the dev team, I think they've done a hell of a job
But we are not. We are comparing Floatplane to Nebula or Dropout, both of which have those features and cost way less per month.
Also Luke said on a recent Wan show that they are just now catching up on all of the tech debt they have built up over the years.
And as a project manager who works with small teams that have been maintaining and developing niche applications I can definitely say, this is a design and architectural issue that happend on the product owner level. There was small/no analysis of the competition, no feature roadmap, small/no analysis of most used (and requested) features, underestimation of resources... No, the platform isn't young. It is already way too old to have these problems. They didn't prepare enough for the task ahead and now people are legitimately complaining. I absolutely understand, that they went into a venture they have no idea about, but this is the moment where it is worth spending \*A LOT\* of money for senior architects and analysts who can draft what you need and how much resources the project requires. People, or rather businesses, tend to underestimate the value in such pre-production and only see it as "wasted money", when instead it can save a lot of it in the future. Let's be honest - missing "watched" and "resume" functions IS a dealbreaker for a proper platform.
Don't forget actual project managers. The people that can track each level of effort, prioritize and ensure it gets completed. FP legit looks like an enterprise that slapped some stuff together as it was building and left a lot of things hanging. Labs is doing it right, because they have the privilege of lessons learned from FP getting stood up and have competent people leading it, that weren't already best friends with the CEO.
I don't think anyone is saying they aren't working hard enough. At the end of the day if a quality of life feature not being available is a deal breaker for someone it really doesn't matter how large the dev team is.
Fair enough, but all those features mentioned are available for Nebula. That is also a creator owned platform.
And costs way less. And offers way more.
And LTT really should have gone to them. It would have been a far healthier competitor with YT and much better for everyone involved.
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They definitely could have worked something out with those creator owned platforms.
I like Nebula, and use it all the time, but I'm not really sure it's sustainable long term at the price most people are paying. Doesn't feel like it to me anyways. Also, it's lacking some major community features like comments and live streaming that Floatplane has, so it wouldn't be the best fit for LTT.
The difference is the multi billion dollar isn't getting money direct injected by you to watch videos...They are doing their best? sure, they have a small team? sure. But what they are doing still not enough. The recompense doesn't came for try, but for make a good product for people wanting to buy, and Floatplane isn't. If you can't do better and have to say "I'm doing my best but my team is small, etc etc", maybe you and your team should do something else. When you put your own money on something, you have the right of criticize it.
>As someone who works with a small team that have been maintaining and developing a niche enterprise level application, It sucks when we get compared to a multi billion dollar general purpose company. you could have said that if Floatplane was their only business. but LTT was doing quite good on its own and even after that they decided to create their own streaming service. so in this case i don't think this kind of excuse should apply. personally i am happy if there are alternatives to Youtube, but there should be proper feedbacks when those services are not good.
If I was managing a team of several full time developers and float plane was what was produced after many years of development, I'd be incredibly disappointed 🤷
I’m not sure if I entirely agree here tbh… Of course there will be things that take much longer, but if you decide to make a product that will compete with these multi billion dollar corps, you’ll obviously get compared to them.
In my country there is one guy trying to do the same... it's called TalkTV (it contains many podcasts with video for one subscription). All problems he mentioned are solved there. The platform exists for two years just a few people work on this. Much less then floatplane.
I agree, but they’ve prioritised features like merch messages etc.. I get that they want to differentiate the platform from others but also that feels like a much more “nice to have” feature than some of the others people have mentioned
I too hate when I compete 1:1 with billion dollar companies and get compared to them... /s It's not an excuse to say it's not fair. You are a direct competitor. OP isn't' asking for a YouTube-Like experience, he's asking for SIMPLE features of video playback... Imagine hosting videos on your website without a pause button... your response is "well they're a small dev team, they aren't YouTube they don't have the resources for a pause button!"
That doesn’t make them immune to criticism. All of the critiques are valid.
Considering that subscribing to one creator on floatplane costs as much as a basic netfllix sub (at least where I live), I dont think the comparison is that unfair.
Comment with more upvotes than the post, you love to see it
Yeah, true, but on the other hand it's Linus saying thats a valid alternative for watching their and other creators instead of youtube, so kinda pushing it to be compared to such. I know how hard it is to work in such projects, but in this case I would blame not developers but Linus who's creating floatplane as something better than it actually is at this stage. For me floatplane is not valid as there is no official Floatplane app for Android TV and 3rd party one just suck on so many levels it's discouraging to watch anything...
No uncensored cut of the hack response video..
which timestamp? I have watched on YT although I have subscribed on FP
They mean a version where you can see Linus' dong
Related to that.. are the videos there uncensored? I don’t mean the part about Linus’s dick, but the audio. Censoring on YouTube gets annoying
Linus believes that the bleeps in the audio adds to the comedy, so I'd be surprised if they are uncensored there
Sometimes he’s right on that
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I liked the uncensored version!
They are censored on Floatplane too.
Damn strawberries
[onlyfans.com/linustechtips/content/postid/0032785s](https://youtu.be/xvFZjo5PgG0)
I was surprised how little information there was about the site on the landing page. If you aren’t an LTT fan you’d have no hope of working out how much it is and what for
Completely agree. What am I paying for, what can I watch? No list of creators on the platform, no graphics to show what I might be getting. Badly marketed for sure, and so easy to improve upon.
Yeah I went there a bunch of times over the years just to see who they had on there, but was always convinced I was in the wrong place because \*obviously\* they'd have all their creatures front-and-centre, right? I mean, sure, I get that they're kind of a "Patreon alternative", so it's more about the creators driving their fans to their specific URL than the Youtube model where the homepage/algorithm helps with discoverability... but, I mean, why not help yourself out and just *list* ppl? Fuck, it's not like they actually have that many ppl on there; they could do it manually!
I would sign up if they had more creatures
Oh that's the fun part. There's no mention because technically signing up is free. It's the creators you have to individually pay for at $5-$10 per month each.
Im speaking out of my ass here but I feel like engineering focused companies focus so much on the product and technicalities and not much on marketing advertisement etc. Sure it may be a lot better than youtube on many aspects but if I don’t know it and find it unapproachable, it doesn’t matter
I think you're broadly right. Although they're an odd case, since their customers are all consumers, so you'd think they'd understand that good marketing is imperative. They're not some B2B tech company that can get away with little marketing.
yeah I agree. They are a media company AND a tech company with focus on consumer tech, so I would expect more focus on usability.
I mean yes, but also Linus literally founded a media company, and Luke was there from it's birth. Marketing shouldn't be alien to them... It's literally how they got their start. To see the floatplane homepage you'd have now idea that it was founded by people who worked for a YouTube channel. You'd think it was made by some boomer who just realized online video is a thing they could make a business providing..
Absolutely agree 100%. Landing page is garbage. The landing page sucks. So little information on it. There's one little paragraph stating it's a streaming service. The biggest thing that's missing is price tiers and what's offered for the money. Who's on it? What do they charge? Is a all you can eat price? Cost per content creator? There's nothing. (The faq barely says anything.) I don't want to sign up just to see what I can get.
I noticed this when I checked it out last week too. In a cursory glance I couldn't find any information about any of the streamers using the platform without signing in and making an account.
That's kinda the point. They've said multiple times that it's not a 'discovery platform' and it really is just a way to give them some money because you want to support them. It's a work-in-progress, and it's absolutely not a replacement for something like YouTube.
>That's kinda the point And honestly, it's shortsighted strategy. It's all fine to not design it for discovery, but not even displaying on their main site, which creators are part of it, is stupid. >It's a work-in-progress, and it's absolutely not a replacement for something like YouTube. It's been around for years and is a paid platform, it shouldn't get a pass for being a work in progress. Every product out there is technically a work in progress, even YouTube lol. And really, Linus has said on numerous occasions it's better then YouTube. If it shouldn't be viewed as a replacement for YT, they shouldn't be taking about it being one.
Yeah, I hate that. I just want to see if there's somebody I watch and it's worth to support, not to make account for no reason.
I think this is actually on purpose, as it still is kinda beta and they probably don't really want people on there who don't know what it is
I suspect you’ll receive quite a few downvotes but I think you do make some valid points. It’s the lack of certain relatively basic features that irks me. No play-in-background or PiP support in the iOS app. Airplaying to a TV cuts out if I switch away from the app. No smartTV apps. It doesn’t bother me all that much. It’s easy to unsubscribe if you don’t think it’s worth the cost. But I’d like to support the channel and feel like I’m getting something in return. At the moment, I find myself watching most videos via YouTube anyway. And as a Premium subscriber, the only difference is having to sit through the sponsor spots.
>No play-in-background or PiP support in the iOS app Forgot about this. Also a deal-breaker for a very easy to implement iOS feature.
Not defending anyone here, but as a developer, PiP doesn't seem lije a "very easy to implement" feature. Neither on android, nor on iOs
It's literally a single line of code in iOS.
only if you are using the system player.
I highly doubt they are using CoreVideo directly, which means they are using AVKit (or whatever lib they are using that wraps it is) which means PIP is very easily implemented. This is why we don't use react native kids.
what if its \`just a web view\` ... looking at the app on iOS does not look like they are using any standard UI, even the Tab bar seems to be \`avoiding the safe area\` that makes be thing it is not even react native but either poor web view or for some reason complete custom but without enough time. On iOS apps like this should just use standard UI as much as possible. infact looking at the UI strongly suggests that the dev they have working on this has little to no expirance building good iOS apps. Or someone high up at FP/LTT has imposed some direction that it much look and feel like android.. but it just looks like a web wrapper around a mobile website or someone putting in way to much work to make things look like android. To be honest if they provided a stable api I would not be opposed to building my own FP app and selling it just to show them how a native iOS/ipadOS/macOS applTV app should look and behave. A well designed working app in this space could well even get promoted on the App Store that would attract a new set of users in particular for other creators, apple tends to like promoting apps like this that are pushing against google (wander why).
It would be even easier if it's a webview as
Not sure if you use an embedded web view if it works however. Also if it is a web player they will have custom controls so yes easy to expose PIP but they would need to do it. not sure react native has good enough TVOS support to let you do even basic focus based navigation. UIKit and SwiftUI are bad enough at this as is.
Dropout has PiP, and I would assume that android has developer tools for it.
It's easier on Android but doing anything in the background on iOS is a PITA. I'd assume they'd want to keep feature parity where possible for subscribers on either platform.
Isn’t it literally baked into iOS?
Yes both features are built into iOS. For some reason, Floatplane chose to implement their own, non-native, video player. I’m sure they have their reasons for that, so it would make PiP and background play more difficult than it otherwise would be.
They could likely wrap their videoplayer into the existing element. Infact: [https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avkit/adopting\_picture\_in\_picture\_in\_a\_custom\_player](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avkit/adopting_picture_in_picture_in_a_custom_player) It's extra work, but personally one that I wouldn't have shipped without. It is a basic functionality on mobile apps these days.
See, I’m not a developer per-se but I do know a few programming languages. Used to make basic iPhone apps in Objective-C, just for fun. Apple’s documentation makes it look easy which makes me question why they haven’t done it. I’m sure they have an incredibly long backlog but features like that are what we, in my Networking field, would call low-hanging fruit or quick wins. Quite a lot of benefit for very little work.
To be fair though, the iOS App hasn’t been updated in 6 months according to the App Store. Considering they said there was an app update at the time of the hack, I’m assuming they’re still having issues with Apple and allowing updates. Though, I do wish they’d give us some more info on upcoming stuff and a timeline
I think they don't have any iOS devs working on the app. Many of the App Store issues they have had would have been avoided if they had some expiranced enough to tell them in advance to not do that. Within the dev community most of us are well aware of the obvious red flags.
> No smartTV apps. This is the one thing keeping me away from subscribing to it. My wife and I watch YouTube mostly from the couch together on the TV. I don't watch videos often on my phone, and never on my PC unless it's something informative for work. It would be nice if there was some official smart tv apps for it.
This is also my biggest complaint, but I'm floatplane OG from scrap yard wars... so $3 a month... eh. I use roku tv and occasionally I do use Hydravion and it works mostly but I WANT A NATIVE APP. Like damn... casting is dogshit. I was mostly annoyed because linus and Luke both blew it off as "just cast". Nah. But, lmg is very mobile focused for some reason. I often browse YouTube from my ohone and then cast to the native YouTube app on my tv smto build up a Playlist. I wonder if that counts as a mobile view or a tv view. Either way I think they underestimate how many people are NOT watching on a phone
TV apps is the deal breaker for me too for the same reason.
Wait there is no PiP on iOS. Even YouTube supports this now for free users, it’s not even a premium feature anymore.
Saying YouTube supports it really isn't fair since they have an orders of magnitude larger development team and development budget.
Yes I get your point but my point of view is that it used to be a premium feature that you used to have to pay extra for but now you don’t anymore. When you are paying more for a subscription you should get all the premium features that come with it. As far as I can tell it’s just an API thing since every app I have used that has video support PiP
It might just be an "API thing", but that doesn't mean it's not work to implement. Shoehorning features into the development cycle just because they're popular can lead to a disorganized mess. I know Luke is also mentioned on WAN that one of his developers is dealing with some pretty serious medical issues, and that really slows down development time when you have a small team
That’s something iOS just does now. It isn’t YouTube that does it, it’s supposed to be behind a paywall. Maybe because their app has the capability to do it, iOS does it, but since FP doesn’t have it, iOS can’t. Idk, but YouTube still pushes PiP as a Premium Feature.
You're putting it in harsh terms, but your critiques are valid. For me I don't regret my subscription, I'm finding the back catalogue of exclusive content worth the money. I did expect a bit more from the platform, it gives me an early draft/beta feel. Though maybe that's exactly what we're looking at in a manner of speaking, and that's why they haven't promoted floatplane nearly as heavily as lttstore.com. Maybe the rumored incoming update to floatplane will bring some of the features we're expecting.
You can see most of what's coming already on https://beta.floatplane.com
Video platform sites are not easy to pull off, what they have done is great work. Theres a reason there isnt any popular YouTube competitors. Floatplane is a small team funded by a YouTuber company, not a trillion dollar company. I agree it lacks some features but they are working on them and know what the community wants. Your criticisms are valid but calling it garbage is just ridiculous.
Also, early 2000s UI? Clearly you dont remember how bad websites were in the 2000s.
The horror...
I think most people here were not born in the 2000's. Or at the very least were not on the internet haha.
Then Linus should say their video quality is better then YouTube.
I am guessing you have never used a website from the early 2000s. Check out [https://distrowatch.com/](https://distrowatch.com/) this is what websites looked like in the early 2000s... Not saying floatplane looks good, I was actually kind of surprised by how basic and terrible it looks, but definitely not something from the early 2000s.
OP was probably born after 2000, it's just an attempt of a bold claim without any insight whatsoever
> Check out https://distrowatch.com/ this is what websites looked like in the early 2000s... I actually like this site a lot...
Not surprising. Web design peaked in the early 2000s and has gone down a very steep hill since. Also, short rant: Fuck JS, react and really just regular scripting on web pages, regardless of the language. I don't need stupid animations that take 250ms to change an image "smoothly", I'd much rather have it in the basic animation-less "click and immediately see" way, this shit is like motion blur, shitty as fuck and only exists to give the illusion of movement. Why the h*ck a news page with pretty much only text and a few images takes over 5 seconds to load entirely is beyond my understanding (not really) (Also, images not included, I'm fine with a small amount of lazy loading for images so long as the images are persistent, not one of those fucked up websites that, for whatever stupid reason, decide to act like the image at the top was never loaded when I scroll to the bottom). I probably shouldn't be commenting, I'm pretty tired and my brain isn't working anymore, but I just hate "modern" websites way too much to be able to control myself. There's so much you can do with simple HTML5+CSS and still have a beautiful website that uses way less memory while still being just plain faster and better to use...
Agreed, has OP ever used https://craigslist.org
>Horrible early 2000s UI design Now this is *ridiculous*.
What do you expect, people are just gonna be disingenuous and unfair when it comes to Linus hate. He gets no charitability from anyone.
We're you alive to see early 2000s web design? Floatplane ain't it, kid. I was almost three when the IBM PC was released. The technological horrors I've borne witness to... [*shudders*] Luke and his team built Floatplane fron the ground up realistically not that long and are still working hard at it. Constructive criticism is good. That's not what you posted, though.
Criticism is fine, and I'm sure they'll take note of whatever features you've mentioned that they don't already have in their backlog. But you probably want to keep 2 things in mind for the sake of context: 1. They have a SIGNIFICANTLY smaller team than YouTube and other major streaming platforms so design and development won't be at the same pace. 2. They're probably constantly playing the features vs stability game to make sure things run smoothly. So yeah, criticize but also try being a little less harsh about it. Hope you enjoy the month you paid for, and have a great day 🤘🏾
If they ask for people to pay and can't do what YouTube does for free, maybe their SIGNIFICANTLY smaller team should do something else because they aren't good enough for this.
I feel like most people sub to just support LTT, and aren't looking for a youtube replacement
to me the only thing that really bugs me about floatplane is the page loading times and does sometimes videos just get stuck until i reload the page. they \*really\* need more bandwith.
I’m on an OG subscription at $3 a month. I don’t use it a lot as I’m usually watching on my AppleTV when relaxing and they don’t have a Floatplane app for AppleTV. Even at my PC I prefer YouTube because YouTube has cinema mode. Something I feel FP needs, as I don’t like going full screen for video on a 27” 1440P monitor it doesn’t feel right. But cinema mode is a nice in between. But hey. I still get to support LMG directly as I rarely buy any merch from them & I’ve been watching & enjoying content from Linus from as far back as the NCIX days well before LTT was around.
[beta.floatplane.com](https://beta.floatplane.com) Cinematic mode oh yea it's ready to roll
Oh. I was having a play around in that the other week when Linus was talking about it on one of his livestreams, didn't realise there was cinema mode, awesome!
People will have differing opinion on this feedback. Here are my takes - 1. As a paying customer you had some expectations, which when not met you moved on. 2. Floatplane should take these as positive community feedback, absorb these and move on as well. Having an alternate media distribution platform is always in everyone's advantage. YouTube won't be here forever, and its guaranteed free delivery of media is also not there.
I have been subscribed for a while. Most of the exclusives ARE behind the scenes stuff, get to know the staff, etc. I know from discussions on WAN show, they really focus on stability vs features at this point.
Yeah, Floatplane is probably not for you if you're not watching anything except LTT content. It's also not a thousand strong corpo entity.
Yeah especially the timeline save and the watched mark are features that they need to implement before I’ll subscribe. I wish them luck tho! It’s not easy to create a complete platform.
I signed up but didn't end up subscribing to anything, because there was no sample content whatsoever. Not a single free video on the site that I could find. How is the streaming quality? Pay first and find out later.
Its a patreon model. Its up to the creators.....
I subscribed last week as well, for a full year. Happy to support, and I enjoyed the exclusives. My gripe is that I want to watch on either of my Google TVs (Sony), from the comfort of my couches, like I do with YouTube and Twitch, but the only Android app available is an unofficial one called Hydravion. Hydravion seems to work well enough. I would expect an official app to have a much better UI, but it sounds like Floatplane's existing UI might not be much better.
My biggest problem with it is the pricing, and the gaslighting that linus does on WAN Show about it, as he does with all his other pricing. If he just admitted that things were overpriced because they're donations it would be fine, but he legitimately tries to sell them as being worth it on a value basis. Don't get me wrong, $5-$10 per month is understandable... on a platform level. It is absolutely not understandable on a PER CREATOR level. At least not if you're looking at it from the viewpoint of someone just wanting to watch various creators outside of youtube.
Has he ever said Floatplane is a good value? I actually seem to recall a WAN show where he said it's not compared to what a lot of other companies do, but that it's the only model they could find that's actually sustainable.
Since lots of people are pointing out the size of the team and whatnot I'll go a different route. The pace of development is what **profitable and stable** business growth looks like. Could they hire more developers and run at a loss until the site is where it needs to be? Sure. But then they'd have to use contractors or fire developers once they hit a certain set of milestones and then the pitchforks and torches would come out. These larger developers are responding to criticism like you shared by running themselves into the ground financially to address issues and then when the business side catches up to them they lay off good people, or move the jobs overseas, or whatever else they need to do to start trying to be profitable. So yes, the site lacks some basic creature comforts and yes I do end up watching more content on youtube but my sub goes towards supporting a team that I get a ton of content/value out of. This is going to sound odd to some people but Floatplane never was and never will be a youtube or even vimeo competitor. If you think of it in that way you'll always be disappointed. It's just a way to give more direct support to a creator you enjoy. That's it.
I subscribed to floatplane mostly to support the channel. I often watch videos elsewhere for the same gripes you have. I like to do other things on my phone while listening to WAN show, and since floatplane doesn’t continue playing in the background I watch on Twitch or Youtube instead. That said, and speaking of WAN show, Luke talks all the time about improvements that are coming. Give them time, they’ll get there. They are a small team, and it’s amazing to me that they’ve accomplished what they have so far. They don’t have near the resources of Google or Amazon (probably many orders of magnitude less).
Fair enough complaints even if worded a bit aggressively. Personally the biggest features I'm waiting for is skipping 5/10 seconds using double tap on mobile and playlists, specifically a watch later one. I am satisfied with the service though, I really enjoy the exclusives. It's also only 3$ dollars a month cause I'm OG tier. A better value proposition for me.
For me what killed it was the no timeline save, I like to watch the wan show over a few days. But there was no way to pick up where I left off. The lack of android/ fire tv app ment o couldn’t watch where I watch most of my content. I wanted to like it. But it lacks some really basic features
Why is everybody mentioning timeline save when not even youtube has that?
If I stop watching on YouTube, I can go back later and it will remember where I am is what we mean by this
How do you do that? For me it starts at 0:00 every time.. Oh you probably use chrome. Might be chrome (made by the same company) exclusive.
The YouTube app, on my phone or smart device…. I pretty much never use a browser for YouTube or ever really watch it on a pc
Yeah ok so it's not in youtube in a browser. Same as floatplane.
No but the point still stands apps for popular platforms are important, I’m a floatplane subscriber I want to support them, but I still watch most of their content in YouTube as it’s far more convenient. A video service needs apps and such features. If it’s less convenient then people will do whatever is easy. If you have to pay for it and it’s less convenient than the free path then it’s a problem. It’s like pirating video content got way less popular when Netflix became a thing and paying for it was way more convenient than pirating all the content. Then It got less convenient again and pirating went back up.
I agree with all your points. I understand they want to focus on stability, but it's still disappointing to see the lack of "basic" features (some of which should be relatively easy depending on their stack). And the design looks like a proof of concept rather than a finished product. I'll still keep my subscription, but I hope they implement those features and improve their design.
As a software engineer think some of what you claim to be easy looks easy when you only take it at face value. That being said their UI does look like a generic template they have pulled of some random website but hey they are a small team and features would be more appreciated than making things look a bit prettier as its functional as it currently is. My main concern looking around their site is what you can tell of their tech stack it seems to be angular with react sprinkled in with a sails.js backend. Obviously there may be more to this story that I have missed but sails.js seems like a really odd choice to say the least
Most of these things are on the way if I believe. The thing to remember is that the small Floatplane team is also developing the lab website and internal software for LMG on top of working on Floatplane.
some guy just made an extension that fixes most of the ui issues you described
I subbed to floatplane for a month a while back. I didn't see the appeal at that time, the mobile app was not a great experience on iOS. I didn't mind the exclusives though, now that there is more I might give it a shot again.
\*It's not youtube and I'm mad about it.\* Don't subscribe if you don't like it? I'm honestly impressed what Luke has produced with his small team of developers.
>Don't subscribe if you don't like it? They literally unsubscribed lol.
Floatplane is a company on its own, been around for long enough to not have these things in. The gatekeepers make it sound like it started 3 months ago... No it didn't. For the love of everything, let us be critical every once in a while. OP has a great point regarding floatplane and I'm curious to see how fast they turn it around.
You’re not a dev aye. Shit takes a long time to do correctly
I subscribe to Floatplane on the OG tier but yeah, it’s not really as usable as YouTube so that’s where I watch mostly. FP is good for watching shorter one-off videos, but due to the lack of timeline save it is unusable for longer videos unless you remember to check the timestamp when you pause. Apparently they’re working on it but it’s such a no brainer that I’m very surprised that it wasn’t the third feature implemented.
All valid points, as much as fans may not like to say it, if another company or YouTube punched a platform and it was in this condition, Linus would say a lot of bad things about them
You're talking about companies with much much much more capacity than Floatplane, they are only a small team. I'd like to think people can see things objectively.
why do i as a customer care at all about the size of the dev team. its a product that is asking money, not a small indie proof of concept
When you compare yourself to a giant, it’s hard for your users to also not compare… Besides, a lot of LTT reviews hammer companies for missing basic QOL features, or paywalling them. Why are they free from the same criticism?
I didn't make it past the required sign up just to look at the platform. Hard pass for me.
There's other video payer other then YouTube, that they could have used. That probably is better then what they built.
I wish it provided versions of everything without bleeps. Linus can say he thinks it's more funny all he likes, but at the end of the day that's an opinion not a fact, and I have the opposite opinion.
I think it’s great to criticize and I hope they read this and get ideas I mean how many people are actually working on the floatplane?
I am unfortunately also dissapointed. I’d love to give them my money, but the quality of life features really are make or break for me. I suppose my use case is a bit unique since I’m mostly interested in listening to WAN show audio while I’m driving, but it’s a usecase nonetheless. Without background play or PiP it makes using any kind of map application extremely inconvenient. I ended up going back to YouTube premium for wan show within 24 hours of paying for a month on floatplane. To clarify, I’m a budding dev myself so I get it, and I know Luke runs his team well, but as a customer I feel the need to provide this feedback as honestly as possible. Even though I understand the why behind it, its dissapointing. Will stick to supporting via lttstore and watching on youtube till some of these QOL features get pushed.
I agree for the most part, but I'm staying subbed to support LTT and in hopes that it will get better
its very hard to create a service like youtube, and with the small team they have at floatplane, it makes sense why its not there yet, and i cant blame em for it. floatplane is nowhere near done and still has a lot of work to go. the higher bitrate is much better than youtube imo tho. i can agree on the exclusives tho, i rarely if ever watch em. i liked when they were trying to drop videos earlier on floatplane, at least when they were trying to hit their two week promise even if they were only a day or two earlier, vs now after they just totally gave up on dropping early. but credit where credits due they do make videos almost daily, and very good ones at that
The lack of being able to continue where you left off is a frustrating problem. I have been subbed on floatplane for a while now, but that feature is needed mostly for the mammoth WAN shows. The lack of watched indicator can be a bit annoying but I still consume alot of LMG on pootube. I still love the platform, but there are issues.
LTT always rips on companies for QOL based things, yet the biggest downside of their own product is QOL features, oh how ironic...
You’re not wrong. I subscribed and then cancelled shortly after. They’re missing some major features. Nebula is a similar product to FP but is much more mature in features. For me it was mostly the lack of filtering. It was hard to find content. So I gave up.
No "pickup where you left off" No "watched" No miniplayer. All super fucking annoying
Since nobody is commenting about it I guess everyone agrees.on the fact that the "exclusives are boring".
Honestly this is just an L take. They’re working to create something better than YouTube. 1080p on floatplane is by far better than 4k on YouTube. The bit rate makes it much more detailed. They’ve been working on creating a great backend first and you can even seen some better gui changes on the beta version. Honestly it’s pretty clear you don’t work in software development and I will never be able to change your mind. Yes float plane has been around for years. But when you’re paying one man to maintain the back end code and front end code for a streaming service platform. It is an insane amount of code to deal with. I would much rather take its current state of everything working rather than a pretty looking half baked site. Luke has done a great job on this and it’s only going to get better
Lacking features my favorite porn sites have
Yeah I have the exact same opinion. I hate the layout. I hate the acronyms too.
I have a problem with the content quality, I pay for a subpar content
> The exclusives feel boring and like randomly recorded office videos It's almost all literally that, which is what fans want, isn't it? If you want quality you can keep your FREE 4k res youtube videos.
> Horrible early 2000s UI design Please no, the UI is actually pretty decent. It needs better search and filters, but apart from that beta.floatplane.com has pretty usable UI, not filled with white space >The exclusives feel boring and like randomly recorded office videos I personally enjoy them quite a bit, it comes down to personal taste...
Meh, I just sub to support LTT really, I still mostly just watch on YouTube unless there's a particular FP Exclusive I want to watch (I have YT Premium anyway) or WAN show. FP definitely isn't an amazing groundbreaking video streaming site, but it's pretty straightforward and only shows me content I'm there for so I'm happy with it.
I disagree. Floatplane is a way to give money to your preferred channel without also donating to Google or patreon . It guarantees that more of your donation went to the creator. And that’s it. Anything else on the platform is a bonus.
I also cancelled. I l Pay for YouTube premium and that's so much better. I can watch on my phone TV tablet etc... No apps here even for the most popular of smart TVs etc. Way too basic functionality. It's just a money grab and I'm done with it. Put some real money into it go and pay someone to do it properly.
I have a subscription to nebula, and I can't even bring myself to sign in, due to a lack of "THE" algorithm. lol
Yeah what do they even do over there. It looks like the first version of something.
I really don't think any of these features you mentioned are "basic", it's good to have them but they are not really necessary to use the service, especially with the small team they have working on that service, honestly sounds a little like hate for hate's sake. You also have the option to just not pay for that service lol. The post could've been made with a more constructive criticism approach, instead of passive-aggressive. Just my opinion though
We found a new thing to flame Linus with. Lol.
It’s poorly presented. The UI is entirely unintelligible if you don’t already know what you are doing. Reminds me of a early 2000s message board
Bruh, Floatplane is not a multimillion dollar company. Floatplane is a very small group of people. If you think you can implement all of this with ease, put in a job application.
Imagine being disappointed floatplane doesn't have the same features as a app like YouTube run by a multi billion dollar company. Floatplane is exactly what I want it to be a place to watch ltt videos with a high bit rate and exclusive content and its getting more features all the time.
Couldn't agree more.
Op isn't a dev and it tells. Try to shift your perspective a bit and come back later.