iPad Battery Drain while using YouTube

I had a 2-ish year old iPad Pro last summer, noticed out of the blue that battery began draining super fast, like 45 minutes or so of watching.

Came here- saw lots of other people have the same issue.

First did/checked everything recommended that I could find, including deleting the YouTube app X2, reinstalling and all of the rest…problem persisted.

Took my out of warranty iPad Pro to a repair shop, he replaced the battery x2 because after the first time it continued. The owner of the shop did the repairs himself, he finally concluded that either someone at Apple or someone at Google is mad at the other guys, this appears to be an “on purpose bug.” I suppose it COULD be that Google began running their Gemini AI engine sometime around last summer (I’ve seen speculation around that) but whatever it is, it not only drained an 85% good battery in about 45m, it drained a brand new (actually three of them) battery in about an hour.

Figuring that the repair shop owner was wrong, I bought a brand new, latest version IPad Pro for maybe $1200 or $1300 or whatever Apple gets for a new one with wifi and cellular capabilities, about halfway to the most storage capacity.

Well…the day I received the new one, I sold my old iPad Pro for maybe $300 or $350, about what I spent replacing a slightly corner cracked screen and a battery. I got about what I spent on repairs for the unit using a 3rd party buyer (can’t remember who offered most but all were lots more than Apple would pay on trade.)

Welp, the problem followed…this one still, to this day gets very hot and drains my battery when using the YouTube app, the only way around it is to run it in a browser, I rarely do that because I guess I never really thought about it and the app is more convenient for me.

As of today, the only solution to avoid significant battery drain while using YouTube is to run it inside of a browser, many on X have suggested a browser I’ve never heard of, I’ll have to look it up again to try it.

Turns out my repair guy is likely right- about June/July, as late as August something definitely changed with the compatibility of YouTube’s app and iOS, or at least iPad devices in general.

I guess I’m asking for advice but every angle/suggestion that I can find has been covered here so far and none make a significant difference. It turns out that either some engineering team at Apple or Google has done this on purpose OR it’s simply LOTS of stuff running in the background that someone believes is valuable enough to provide about 1hr of viewing time before requiring a recharge.

Perhaps posting here is useful to someone out there- no need to buy a new device, it doesn’t matter. $12-$1300 (maybe more, I cannot remember) later the problem will follow. Someone, somewhere should either fix the issue or at least come clean with what’s going on.

FWIW