Back in May, Microsoft and Google had a spat about the YouTube app for Windows Phone that Microsoft developed. The app was a fairly fully featured YouTube client, but it didn't show ads, and in its initial iteration, it allowed videos to be downloaded for viewing offline.

Microsoft updated the app to remove the download capability, but Google still wasn't happy with the lack of ads. Eventually Microsoft pulled the app entirely, replacing it with an older, simpler (mostly ad-free) client.

Recently, the two companies must have worked out their differences—the app is back.

From a cursory examination, the app seems to be almost identical to the version that was pulled—except now, it shows pre-roll ads on monetized videos, thereby making Google happy.

However, it goes one step further. Unlike the old app, the new app supports video uploads. Videos you record on the phone can be posted directly to YouTube.

Unfortunately, this comes with a big provision. Due to certain design decisions that Microsoft has made in Windows Phone, only very short videos (no more than 5MB) can be uploaded over cellular networks. Anything larger will require Wi-Fi. Worse, any video over 20MB in size will require both Wi-Fi and external power. Any video larger than 100MB won't upload at all.

This is because Microsoft is doing the upload as a background transfer. The upside to this is that it means your video will finish uploading even if you switch away from YouTube, and the upload can't quietly gobble all your data quota or run down your battery. The downside is these rather onerous size restrictions. 1080p video that I shot on a Lumia 1020 came in at about 3MB per second, so even 100MB isn't very much video.

I can understand what Microsoft is trying to achieve here—no point making you wait for an upload to complete when you could be checking Twitter instead—but in practice, this restriction severely curtails the utility of the upload feature. I hope they either revisit the platform constraints and allow more liberal background transfers or alter the YouTube app to simply not use background transfers at all. There needs to be a way to upload even long videos without using either Wi-Fi or charging the phone. It would also be good if the app could recompress videos to make them smaller, as iOS does for its built-in YouTube video sharing.

Sure, such changes might be "bad" for battery life, but the alternative leaves Windows Phone deficient relative to the competition.

The limitations weirdly leave me more frustrated with the app than I would be if it couldn't upload at all. As a YouTube watching app, it's perfectly good. It supports subscriptions and commenting and sharing videos; it integrates with the Music + Video hub. It does all the things that I expect. But the barely useful upload feature taunts me, as if it were saying, "I could let you upload this video. But I won't."