Turn iPad into a one-click youtube player

Question

My grandma has an iPad but she doesn't know how to use YouTube to play her favorite songs. I'm trying to create a one-click solution that'll open YouTube and start her playlist. At the moment, I can create a home screen schortcut from Safari which loads the playlist in Safari. There're several problems with this:

• For some reason it doesn't auto play the songs, even with the &autoplay=1 attached to the URL.

• It doesn't load in the YouTube app. The webpage is not very grandma-friendly: she has shaky hands, her touch action to play the video tends to scroll the page instead. I've tried with youtube:// URL scheme, but it's impossible to add this URL to the home screen. Safari only allows me to do that after the page is fully loaded, and the URL textbox is not editable.

• I live in a different country. It is best if I can change the playlist remotely upon request. I've tried creating a bitly short URL with the hope to be able to reconfigure it to a different playlist remotely. However, I haven't figured out how to add this bitly URL to the homescreen yet -- same reason as above.

Any suggestions? I have a hunch that there's an app to do this!

Answer 1

Okay never mind. I'm making a Github page to do this.

Put the following code to a HTML page, which loads the YouTube app upon open:

<script>
window.location.href="youtube://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[videoId]";
</script>

Host the page somewhere, for example github.io, and then add a shortcut on the homescreen.