Google has seemingly outdone itself in terms of discontinuing merchandise and experiences in a brief period of time — as 9to5Google reports, after rolling out a brand new interface for some older Chromecasts final winter, the corporate has mainly made it ineffective. In a reply to a customer on Twitter, the corporate says you’re not capable of log in to your YouTube account on older variations of the streaming puck, leaving you higher off simply casting out of your telephone (particularly for those who pay to see an ad-free YouTube).

While selecting movies in your telephone and sending them to your TV by way of the Chromecast was initially how the gadget was speculated to work, Google not too long ago added to that have. Last yr, customers received the power to make use of their telephones as a distant to scroll by way of a YouTube UI on the Chromecast, letting them use their huge display screen to select movies.

While you possibly can technically nonetheless flick through YouTube utilizing your telephone as a distant, you’ll have to take action as a logged-out visitor — no customized suggestions, playlists, or viewing historical past from the remainder of your units straight on the Chromecast. For YouTube Premium subscribers, it’s even worse; at present, in the event that they use the YouTube interface on the Chromecast, it’ll embrace the advertisements they pay to not see on the remainder of their units.

While that is principally a minor inconvenience (once more, you can nonetheless use your telephone to queue up movies, which is able to play with out advertisements for those who’re a Premium subscriber), the weird factor is how Google has communicated pulling a significant a part of a comparatively new function. Here’s Google in December 2021, tweeting to point out off how you may get YouTube’s UI straight on the Chromecast:

And right here it’s in June 2022, dropping a bombshell to most customers that signing into YouTube is not supported on “older Chromecast devices:”

Talk about whiplash — there are dozens of replies to YouTube asking why it’s eliminated the function and why it didn’t announce that it was doing so, leaving customers annoyed by an unexplained “Can’t sign in” error message. We’ve reached out to Google to ask why it made the change and to get a listing of precisely which Chromecast units this impacts, however to this point, we haven’t obtained a response.

There’s yet one more twist that makes this entire factor even stranger. In a forum reply noticed by Android Police, a Google group supervisor says that the corporate is working to resolve a problem the place Premium members see advertisements when utilizing the distant to manage YouTube on their Chromecasts. It’s exhausting to think about a software program answer to that downside that wouldn’t allow, you understand, the very same logged-in expertise that folks had entry to just some weeks in the past earlier than it was eliminated.