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Safari YouTube only on 360p

Hello I keep going on YouTube to watch videos, but the problem is over the past few weeks, I haven’t been able to change the HD quality. In the settings on YouTube, the videos had the option of 360p up to 720p. But now there is only 360p. I can’t enjoy watching videos if I can’t see them clearly. Please help me.

iPhone 6s Plus, iOS 9

Posted on Jul 22, 2024 4:15 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jul 22, 2024 9:44 PM

Apparently YouTube only offers 360p on non-current iOS versions.

I have 2 iPhones SE here, one with iOS 14.8 (only 360p selectable) and one with iOS 17.4.1 (there I can select from the usual range - up to 1080p on the tested video). Changing browser (eg. to Brave) doesn't make a difference here.

5 replies

Oct 21, 2024 7:26 PM in response to Myablackfyre

Solution: Did more testing and found out you can watch videos in any quality…only when you use the YouTube application(you probably already know), sorry to anyone avoiding this path, I tried a handful of mainstream browsers and they all will not allow a change of video quality higher than 360p when watching YouTube videos in a browser in IOS lower then the current version as mentioned by another commenter. 


This issue has nothing to do with internet speed or connectivity based on my tests involving mobile network’s and WiFi, this also has nothing to do with the device hardware limitations as the YouTube application allows you to play videos in 1080p smoothly, however this is probable subject to change should YouTube in the near future lose it’s backwards compatibility support for older devices in the App Store, fingers crossed 🤞 


Conclusion: the internet is not a free place, now get back to work.

Sep 5, 2024 5:38 PM in response to Tesodur

I also replicated the conditions on new and older iPhones and did the same to android phones, the difference is that android phones are still able to play any video quality regardless of how old, the oldest android version tested as 7.1.1 while the oldest iOS version tested was 15.8.2, this can also be seen in iOS version 16.7.10 suffering the same issue of quality throttling.

Safari YouTube only on 360p

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