Conversation

A/B testing on users without their informed consent is bad. We didn't sign up to be your test subjects, and we'd like the app to function the way it has for years(?) without our work (or play) being disrupted by your janky product research experiments.

Recently, YouTube introduced an in-app screensaver in the tvOS (AppleTV) app. It was an incomplete implementation with no way to configure or disable the screensaver, so it just put videos of ugly hippos on my screen after 10 minutes and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I sent a couple feedback messages complaining about it into their feedback black hole, and a couple weeks later, the screensaver disappeared. And I could never find anything in YT's docs about it. Smells like an undisclosed A/B test to me. I hope they learned more than they expected from this experiment. Like, don't do these experiments on unsuspecting users just trying to get the app to work the way it's supposed to.