Use This App to Watch YouTube Videos on Apple Watch
While no one really wants to watch YouTube videos on displays as small as the Apple Watch, this can come in handy if you want to quickly watch something on the go or refer to the next step in our guide to fixing a leaky faucet. In such cases, WatchTube is the Apple Watch app that will let you watch even when your iPhone isn’t around.
WatchTube is free and supports most YouTube videos. At least for now, you can’t watch short YouTube videos or live videos, but most other videos should play. I found that the app opened fairly quickly on the Apple Watch SE, and it was able to download videos from its carefully curated feed with little delay – and since the Apple Watch has a good display, videos don’t look too bad on it, either. However, most YouTube videos don’t use a square aspect ratio, which means you’ll see black bars at the top and bottom of the video to compensate.
Ideally, you should use a pair of Bluetooth headphones like AirPods when watching videos with WatchTube to avoid draining your battery too much. Otherwise, WatchTube plays audio from the Apple Watch speaker, which can drain your battery by a few percentage points after each video. While video plays reasonably well, the Apple Watch’s speaker isn’t designed to play audio this way. (You definitely don’t want to rely too much on this for listening to music.)
WatchTube has four main screens: curated feed, search, history, and settings. You can change the curated feed to show only certain types of videos, such as games or news. The app also supports closed captions and you can also adjust the text size. (While this is a good option, you can imagine that reading captions on a watch screen isn’t ideal.)
Once you select a video on WatchTube, you can rate it before it starts playing. You can also click on the gear icon to open more options. Here you can read the description, enable or disable subtitles, read comments, and even generate a QR code to share the video. You can use another device to scan the QR code and play the video on the second device.
Keep in mind that the app doesn’t currently support signing in, so you’ll have to live without subscriptions and custom videos if you want to watch videos on your Apple Watch.