I have some feedback on the Brave browser on iPhone iOS specifically. It’s mostly in regards to the “playlist” feature (it’s a lengthy feedback, but I hope it will help improve the experience).
I absolutely love the Playlist feature on the Brave browser on iOS (downloading YouTube videos to play offline), however, it is extremely buggy and has lots of issues.
First of all, the thumbnail images of the offline playlist downloads never gets saved permanently, so if I clear the browser data and cache, the offline playlist video downloads are still there but the thumbnail images are deleted. Sometimes, the thumbnails get deleted automatically if the iPhone storage is low, or if I did an iTunes backup and restore. I would like it if the thumbnail images were saved permanently so it doesn’t have to reload, these thumbnail images take up only a few KB of storage space so it’s not a problem (plus, you can just take a preview of the video and use it as a thumbnail image). The only way to reload the thumbnail images is to manually open every single URL of each video and play the video on YouTube, then open the playlist again and go to the video and the thumbnail will reload (and sometimes it loads slowly).
Next problem: the most recent update to the app included a feature to create custom folders for playlist downloads (which I really enjoy this new feature). However, many of my offline playlist downloads disappeared and did not show up in the playlist, the only playlist downloads that showed were the ones that had recently been downloaded, and the rest did not show up (I guess this is a bug). It appears as if it will only show the videos that still have the website cache saved. This problem mostly applies to users of the previous version of Brave who downloaded videos prior to updating the Brave app, the new version of the app does not show the users downloaded videos.
And another issue: when I do a full iTunes backup of my iPhone, the Brave browser doesn’t not actually backup my offline playlist downloads (it does not save the offline video downloads, it will only remember the URL of the downloads and not physically save them in the backup). So when I restore the iPhone from the iTunes backup, all of my offline playlist downloads have to be redownloaded again and it takes forever to do that, especially because of the fact that I have to manually open every single video URL
of every individual video because it won’t download it unless I first open the URL of the video first to reload the cache and that takes very long to go through hundreds of videos (if I tried to redownload the video from the playlist, it refuses to download, it will only download unless I open the link to the URL first and play the video from YouTube and reload the website cache). So I would like the developers to allow the offline playlist downloads to be fully backed up when the user does an iTunes backup, OR at least fix the issue where the user has to manually open the video URL to reload the cache in order to redownload it from the playlist.
The last issue is the lag: many times, when scrolling through a long list in my playlist, it lags very badly. I hope the developers can fix the issue with the lag.
So summary:
- Fix issue with thumbnail images, make thumbnails of download playlist videos permanent
- Fix issue with offline playlist downloads not showing in the playlist after user updates Brave iOS app from Version 1.35.1 to Version 1.36
- Allow Brave offline playlist downloads to be fully backed up on iTunes (not just remember the URL of the videos, but actually save the offline video itself in the backup)
- Fix the issue where the user has to manually open every URL of each YouTube video and reload the cache in order to redownload it from the playlist
- Fix the issue with the lagging problem in the playlist, especially when scrolling through a very long list
Thank you, I hope an iOS Brave developer reads this and consider these changes!