UPDATE 13/04/26 A proxy-based workaround is applied by #3439, referencing a page deployed from https://github.com/IDEMSInternational/youtube-iframe-proxy. I'm inclined to keep this issue open, as it would be good to move away from the proxy-based solution in future.
Original issue
Deployment-level issue here: ParentingForLifelongHealth/plh-kids-teens-app-my-content#133
Describe the bug
On iOS (other platforms are unaffected), the youtube component does not display the embedded player, instead showing "Error 153".
We had an issue that manifested in the same way previously, and resolved it with #3305. It seems that YouTube updated their API requirements around October 2025 to require a referrer – see these open issues: 1, 2; this forum post; and YouTube's official docs.
It looks like a potential fix was opened in the Capacitor repo last week: ionic-team/capacitor#8419. We can't know if/when that will be merged, and we would need to upgrade Capacitor deps from v7 -> v8 in order to include after it has been (#3310).
Potential workaround
There are various solutions proposed for issues like this in general (outside of Capacitor context), see for example, this discussion. I have applied some of them in #3431, however this does not fix the issue in our case.
The commonly proposed workaround in the Capacitor case is to set up a self-hosted page elsewhere that can be used as a proxy to route the YouTune requests through. See a detailed explanation here (and references to this approach here, here and here. With this approach, I believe we could still support the author-facing params that we expose, as these get passed through as query params on the youtube URL.
UPDATE 13/04/26 A proxy-based workaround is applied by #3439, referencing a page deployed from https://github.com/IDEMSInternational/youtube-iframe-proxy. I'm inclined to keep this issue open, as it would be good to move away from the proxy-based solution in future.
Original issue
Deployment-level issue here: ParentingForLifelongHealth/plh-kids-teens-app-my-content#133
Describe the bug
On iOS (other platforms are unaffected), the
youtubecomponent does not display the embedded player, instead showing "Error 153".We had an issue that manifested in the same way previously, and resolved it with #3305. It seems that YouTube updated their API requirements around October 2025 to require a
referrer– see these open issues: 1, 2; this forum post; and YouTube's official docs.It looks like a potential fix was opened in the Capacitor repo last week: ionic-team/capacitor#8419. We can't know if/when that will be merged, and we would need to upgrade Capacitor deps from v7 -> v8 in order to include after it has been (#3310).
Potential workaround
There are various solutions proposed for issues like this in general (outside of Capacitor context), see for example, this discussion. I have applied some of them in #3431, however this does not fix the issue in our case.
The commonly proposed workaround in the Capacitor case is to set up a self-hosted page elsewhere that can be used as a proxy to route the YouTune requests through. See a detailed explanation here (and references to this approach here, here and here. With this approach, I believe we could still support the author-facing params that we expose, as these get passed through as query params on the youtube URL.