If like me, you have a Smart TV that runs on the Android TV OS, and you’d like to login to the YouTube app for your kids managed accounts, but can’t, then this article should help you.
I purchased a Philips Ambilight OLED 65OLED707 TV several months ago, and it’s a pretty decent TV, apart from a shockingly bad implementation of freesat, which only allows unsorted channels, but that aside, it’s good. The Android TV OS is really good, fairly flexible, and has a great home screen, but for some reason Google have chosen to not allow managed accounts to login to the YouTube app. This seems daft to me, as it means that you can’t enforce certain restrictions on your kids usage.
Each time I tried to login, I was met with an error saying ‘The software on this device isn’t compatitble with your child’s Google Accounts‘. I still don’t get why, but I found a way to work around this.
How to login to a childs YouTube account on an Android TV
So, I’ll start with saying that I didn’t find a way to do this, without removing the managed element of the childs account. So, to overcome it I came across an called Smart Tube, which allows you to not only login with your childs account, but also it seems to remove the adverts.
How to install SmartTube on an Android TV
The installation instructions are available on the Smart Tube Github page, but I’ll also go through them below, for the stable version:
1) Go to the playstore and install an app called ‘AFTVnews‘
2) Open the AFTVnews app
3) Enter kutt.it/stn_stable and select GO
4) You might get prompted with a message saying ‘For security reasons, your phone is not allowed to install unknown apps from this source’. If you do, click settings (keeping in mind, that this is technically less secure, so proceed at your own risk)
5) Turn on Downloader
6) Now that’s done, re-open AFTVnews, enter kutt.it/stn_stable again and select GO, and you’ll see the app download
7) When asked if you want to open the app, select ‘Open’
8) Now all that is left is to sign in to SmartTube with your childs Google account.
Conclusion on SmartTube
SmartTube isn’t as slick as YouTube, but for my youngest, it works just fine, and it’s much better than the YouTube Kids app. Also, having no adverts is a big bonus. So I’d recommend it.