A desktop app for YouTube — and nothing else.
Sign in with your Google account so your subscriptions and history are there, but that session cannot reach any Google service outside YouTube. Gmail, Photos, Drive and Google Account are all blocked.
Watching YouTube in a browser tab means the rest of Google is one click away, sharing the same signed-in session. This app exists to make YouTube a plain desktop app: log in once, watch, and have the account stay fenced inside YouTube.
- Passkey (Windows Hello) sign-in
- Session survives restarts — sign in once
- Dark window, title bar included
- Mouse gestures for back / forward / close, and
Rto rotate a video
Grab one of the two files from dist:
| File | What it is |
|---|---|
YouTube Desktop Setup 1.1.1.exe |
Installer. Adds Start menu and desktop shortcuts |
YouTube Desktop 1.1.1.exe |
Portable. Just double-click it |
The builds are unsigned, so Windows SmartScreen will warn on first run. Choose More info → Run anyway.
Built for Windows 11. It runs on Windows 10, but the title bar follows the system colour there.
Menu → 계정 (Account) → Sign in with Google.
If your account has a passkey, Windows Hello appears and a fingerprint, PIN or face is all it takes. Passwords work too.
The session is stored under %APPDATA%\YouTube Desktop and survives restarts.
Signing out: menu → Account → Sign out. Cookies, cache and storage are all cleared.
Hold the right mouse button and drag.
| Gesture | Action |
|---|---|
| ← drag left | Back |
| → drag right | Forward |
| ↓ then → (an L shape) | Close the window |
A drag has to travel at least 60 pixels. Straight gestures are ignored if they move further vertically than horizontally, and a right-click that stays put still opens the normal menu.
The L gesture closes the window it was drawn in. Draw it in a popup and only the popup closes; draw it in the main window and the app quits.
Alt+← / Alt+→ and the 탐색 (Navigate) menu do the same thing.
Press R to turn the video a quarter turn clockwise. Four presses bring it back upright. Useful for phone footage that was uploaded sideways.
Only the video rotates — the player controls and the page stay where they are — and it is resized to fill as much of the player as it can. On a portrait monitor in fullscreen, a landscape video turned on its side fills the height.
The rotation resets when a different video starts, and R is ignored while you are typing in the search box.
| Opens in the app | All of YouTube, YouTube Music, YouTube Studio, the sign-in page |
| Blocked | Gmail, Google Photos, Drive, Docs, Calendar, Google Account, Google Search, … |
| Opens in your default browser | Links that have nothing to do with YouTube (external links in video descriptions and so on) |
Asking for a blocked Google service brings up a dialog with an open in default browser option. That browser does not share this app's session.
An interrupted sign-in can leave a half-established session, and Google then treats you as already signed in and never re-runs the flow. Menu → Account → Sign out, then sign in again.
If a window is already open, launching again just brings that window forward. Check the taskbar and your other virtual desktops.
That is the Windows icon cache. Press F5 in Explorer, or restart Explorer:
taskkill /f /im explorer.exe && start explorer.exeNavigation and blocking are recorded here:
%APPDATA%\YouTube Desktop\ytd.log
Query strings are stripped before writing, since they carry account tokens.
- "Manage your Google Account" in the YouTube avatar menu is blocked by design. The dialog offers to open it in your default browser.
- Memberships and Super Thanks work only where the payment sheet stays inside the app. Flows that take over the whole page are blocked.
- No ad blocking.
- Passkeys do not work on macOS or Linux — Electron cannot present the WebAuthn UI on those platforms (electron#24573).
npm install
npm startIf PowerShell refuses
npm(... npm.ps1 cannot be loaded because running scripts is disabled) usenpm.cmdinstead. PowerShell resolvesnpmto thenpm.ps1script, which the execution policy blocks; there is no need to change that policy.npm.cmd start
To build the installer yourself: npm run dist — output lands in dist.
An unofficial personal client. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Google or YouTube. YouTube is a trademark of Google LLC. The app icon is a plain play button, deliberately not the YouTube logo.