A bit over a year ago, I noticed that when I went to update my apps in the play store, a problem kept appearing with YouTube: "couldn't update". It was strange but ultimately didn't matter. This was until the last month or so, when YouTube required the user to update the app in order to access the main page. So in order to use the app, I need to update it, which I can't do.

What have I tried? First idea was to reinstall the app, but I can't do that because YouTube was preinstalled with Android. The next idea was to clear my cache and memory in the app. This did work, but only the first time I tried it. I closed the app, reopened it, and was back to where I was. Clearing cache/memory has not worked since then either.

So now I'm stumped, and I'm forced to use the browser version of YouTube. Google's help page is super shallow about this issue as well. Anyone have any ideas? Additionally, why could it be that the app isn't able to update?

As the title says, YouTube will not update for me. Whenever I go to open up the YouTube page in Google Play I get a blank screen with an error message, "something went wrong, try again." Additionally, my YouTube app itself informs me that I need to update when I open it, and will not let me access anything other than a button that takes me to the play store.

I've tried every fix I can think of. I have cleared the cache from every relevant app, I've tried accessing Google Play through several accounts I have defaulted on my device, I've restarted my phone, reset my phone, I've force disabled YouTube and Google Play and re-opened them, and I've gone through my At&T's phone test.

If it helps, I'm on a Galaxy G8-thin Q X, using the current Android OS, and my play store is up to date, and I have 65 unused GB of storage.

Any and all help is appreciated.

Well..i just update the yt app and now the app doesn't let me in. I keep clicking on it and it sends me back every time. What's going on..what do i do with this..

I installed the lasted recommended version on my fresh install of android 14 (custom rom of course, with nikgapps if it matters), and it auto-updated the app, losing the patches and what not. Auto update was off and still is, i had to double check because I made the mistake once. What gives? Did something change with google? I remember some script to separate the app from the play store back in the day but not sure if that's the silver bullet to do right now, as it had been working so far just disabling the auto update. If anyone encountered this and/or fixed already, let me know.

Edit: Since the response from the team, as you can see below, was vague and didn't offer an actual solution for the problem, I'm doing my part for root/magisk users: I'm using now the magisk module of revanced youtube with the detach module from github.com/j-hc/. It's not official, I can't guarantee it's safe. So far it hasn't updated itself, and it's working as expected. Which is what we all wanted right, no need to make a scene out of this.