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YouTube Kids launches yay US only booo


G+_Marlon Thompson
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It's a great start. No Chromecast support makes this a nonstarter in my house though (not because of me... My girl loves and uses Chromecast with YouTube all the time.) Also, being locked to a limited selection of playlists without the ability to add certain channels yourself kind sucks. There are a few kid friendly channels that my daughter loves and neither of them are there by default. You can search for them inside the app but my five year old can't do search on her own so that's of limited use. Pretty much the first thing she said when she used it was "where's the real YouTube?!"

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Sometimes I wonder what the point of these "Kids" versions of apps are. They just seem to be really limited and slimmed down versions of the proper app with loads of really important stuff missing. Surely time would have been better spent beefing up the parental controls in Android as a whole (the rumours are they're prepping for it if the apk teardowns of recent Play Services is to be believed).

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Tom Wisniewski, I just installed it on my wife's Moto X (2013) which is running KitKat, so Lollipop is not required.  Also, when it comes to a service, they generally don't limit it to Lollipop.

 

Additionally, no Chromecast support is not a big deal for me.  More than likely, I'll hand my phone/tablet to my kids and let them have a day.

 

That being said, this combined with screen pinning in Lollipop make a great combination.

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Jason Howell - You can actually get what you're asking for on Android tablets running 4.2+ with a Restricted User.  This is how I handle my Nexus 7's for my kids.  I install a bunch of apps that they are allowed to use, enable them in the restricted profile, and have the main account "locked" with a PIN.  This works really well for my uses.

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Joseph Cappellino I was going to suggest that same setup. There are a lot of things to like though in this app, the explore tab showed me some channels I never knew existed that I know my nieces would enjoy. I fear, however,  its going to be US restricted for quite some time which is a bummer. It is apparent that they made deals with partners as some of the content is limited to the US like the Sesame Street videos and I don't see them making global deals quickly especially for my neck of the woods. 

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