YouTube App for Windows Phone 8 Makes its Way Back

YouTube is more than just media storage for funny video clips. YouTube has become a way for many to learn and educate themselves on topics they are interested in. For example, my daughter had a poor professor during her first year of college and was having trouble understanding the class topics. She spun up the topics on YouTube and educated herself to pass the class and it provided a much better learning environment than the college did. Personally, I subscribe to several channels related to IT topics, allowing me to keep tabs on the latest technologies. If I hear about something that is new, I can generally find a video on YouTube to satisfy my curiosity or dig deeper into the topic if it's required.

So, having a good YouTube app on my Windows Phone is valuable, allowing me to learn on the go, in any situation.

In case you missed it, a couple months back Microsoft released its own, personally developed YouTube application for Windows Phone 8. And, the app was good – real good. Google took offense to the app and sent Microsoft a cease and desist letter. There were a number of reasons for Google to want to have the app removed, but the primary reason was that the original release didn't offer the ability for ad placement. As we all know, Google's main revenue comes from the ability to glean all user activity for ad targeting.

The public was severely disappointed when Google issued that the app should be removed from the Windows Phone store. The app was that good. I never uninstalled the app and have used it several times.

Microsoft's YouTube app has been updated and is now available in the Windows Phone store again. The original app allowed downloading of videos, but this feature has been removed at Google's request. In place of the extracted feature, Microsoft has added new features such as upload capability, live channel streaming, voice search, and voice activation.

The app can be located by searching the Windows Phone store on your device for 'Microsoft YouTube', or you can just install it from the following link:

Microsoft's YouTube App