YouTube is getting rid of the YouTube Kids app for TVs.
You may remember that in 2023, YouTube baked its Kids functionalities into the standard YouTube app available on things like smart TVs and gaming consoles, allowing users to switch between main YouTube and YouTube Kids within one app.
YouTube now plans to remove the standalone Kids app altogether this July.
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Per Android Police, this change was announced in a recent Google support document.
The Kids app will be scrubbed from all living room TV platforms, so things like smart TVs, streaming devices (Amazon‘s Fire Stick, Chromecast, etc), and video game consoles.
This will not affect the Kids app on iOS/Android mobile devices. And it also won’t affect anything else to do with YouTube’s Kids partition; per Android Police, living room TV watchers who access YouTube Kids through the main YouTube app will continue to have access to all its parental control and child safety features. So, folks using the Kids app on TVs right now will have to migrate over to the main app, but they’ll find all the familiar functionalities there.
We’re curious how much YouTube’s decision to integrate Kids into the main YouTube app for TVs affected TV viewership over the past few months. TV viewership has been one of YouTube’s big concerns for years now, and it’s paying off: YouTube users now watch more than one billion hours of content a day on living room TVs.
