The Nintendo Switch 2 Should Get Its Most Important App Soon
Switch 2
The Nintendo Switch 2 is out and has sold millions of copies already. Its game roster is mostly reprised hits, with only a few truly new entries (Mario Kart World), but owners also want the handheld to be able to do more than just play games.
As it stands, there is no YouTube app on the Nintendo Switch 2, mirroring the issue that the Switch 1 had for a long while. The original Switch was launched on March 3, 2017 and it did not get the much-requested YouTube app until November 8, 2018, over a year later.
Nintendo and Google are apparently both trying to avoid that kind of lengthy wait this time around. The YouTube team app responded to a fan asking about the issue, and got a response:
I'm not sure a list of other devices that play YouTube is helpful here. The timeline here is 'soon,' which I take to mean less than a year like we saw with the Switch 1. I am amazed that Nintendo has been making this console for probably half a decade and once again it launched without key dedicated video apps, YouTube included. I'm not clear on how they can get CDPR to tireless work on making Cyberpunk 2077 work well on the Switch but they can't figure out how to get YouTube or Hulu on the system for launch. It's bizarre.
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Right now you can transfer the old YouTube Switch app to the Switch 2 but…it doesn't work, so that's not any sort of workaround. This is one of those things where I think we give Nintendo too much slack about, the fact that the console can launch with almost no actually new games and not even a ton of standard apps that it should have for day one. But hey, it's Nintendo and Nintendo always gets passes.
Hopefully we hear more about this soon from a source other than what a help account bot, but I have to believe it's a priority on at least Google's side, if not Nintendo's. There's no way it can take as long as it did last time, right? Right?
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
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