14 DAY TRIAL // Recently launched by Google, the stand-alone YouTube video sharing application for Android is only compatible with devices running Android 2.2 Froyo.
The application comes with a variety of new features, such as in-page playback (read comments and play videos at the same time), rotate to full-screen, personalisation of home screens, as well as new player controls.
Unfortunately, it seems that Google left out all the people that are owning smartphones running older versions of the operating system.
Thanks to the guys over XDA forum, users of Android 2.1 Eclair devices will be able to install the new application on their phones.
The XDA member rolle3k managed to hack the newest YouTube application, but he had to remove two calls and add android.util.base64, which was introduced with Froyo.
Users that already downloaded and installed the application on their phones are reporting that it works flawlessly as long as they don't sign in.
It seems that when you're signed in you'll get a “force close” message, sometimes resulting in a force close loop, which might persist even after reboot.
The above problem should be corrected in a future release that might be up and running in the next 24 hours.
Before installing the new version be sure to remove the default YouTube application. You can uninstall the old version and install the new one either by using the ADB Shell or Root Explorer apps.
If you're using ADB Shell here is what you need to do:
adb remount adb shell rm system/app/YouTube.apk adb uninstall com.google.android.youtube
Install the new application using the package manager or with adb (adb install YouTube_signed.apk). According to what kind of ROM you're using you might have to replace the file's name with YouTubeHD.apk when you write the ADB command.
As a side note, rumors are saying that this is the same YouTube version that will be pre-installed on Gingerbread platform too, so don't expect something new when Android 3.0 hits the market, if this happens to be true.
Check out the forum thread for the download link and feedback.