v1.4.13
YouTube downloads save a complete file at last — and when they cannot, the app says so instead of failing silently.
Downloads were still failing after 1.4.12. Measuring the transfer itself rather than the code around it showed why, and turned up a second problem that was quietly worse.
YouTube downloads failed after exactly one megabyte
Each download link YouTube issues carries a small transfer budget. Measured repeatedly against the live service: the first 1,048,576 bytes always arrive and the very next byte is refused — whichever way it is asked for. One large request, four small ones, with or without a size check, a fresh link for every piece: the wall lands in the same place every time. It is a limit on the link, not a broken connection. The app was treating that refusal as fatal and giving up, which also skipped the fallback that does work — the matching version from the main catalogue, which downloads complete in a couple of seconds. That fallback now runs, and the notification tells you a matching version was saved rather than the exact upload you tapped.
Half-finished downloads were being saved as if they were whole
The only size check was "at least 64 KB", so a four-minute song cut off at one megabyte passed it. The fragment was renamed, added to your library and counted as a success. Offline it played about forty seconds and stopped, with nothing anywhere saying it was incomplete — worse than an honest failure, because the file stays on your phone. A download that arrives short is now discarded, and the message says how much of it actually came through.
Good to know
- Songs from the main catalogue were never affected — those download complete at full quality and always have.