[Bug] [YouTube] Video thumbnails from certain channels disappear from feeds after some time

[acarasimon96]

Checklist (Your issue will be automatically closed if you delete this part)

• [x] No "Found a solution for the error you encountered" notification was shown when opening the error report.
• [x] I make sure that there are no existing issues - open or closed - which I could contribute my information to.
• [x] I am able to reproduce the bug with the latest version given here: CLICK THIS LINK.
• [ ] I have attached the error report in the issue (N/A).

Describe the bug

Video thumbnails of a few subscribed channels on the What's New feed would be replaced by a generic gray play icon thumbnail after a while.

Steps to reproduce the bug

1. Subscribe to a YouTube channel that is affected by this bug. In my case, it was usually the channel of Linux vlogger Michael Horn.
2. Wait a few hours.
3. Reopen PipePipe and open the What's New feed.
4. Notice that the videos by the channel you just subscribed to had their thumbnails replaced as described above.

Device (e.g. Pixel 9 Pro)

Pixel 7a

Error report

N/A - The missing thumbnails do not trigger an error notification or crash the app.

Additional context

The missing thumbnails are loaded just fine when you open the channel page of the affected uploader or open/play the affected video, and they would persist for a few hours or days.

I tried clearing cached webpage metadata from PipePipe settings and the app cache from system settings, and neither of those forced the app to reload the affected thumbnails.

After further investigation, I noticed that it's likely caused by the app loading old thumbnail URLs when the thumbnail of a video in the feed is updated.

Screenshot

As shown above, I put together a channel group of all the channels where I'm seeing this happen in the What's New feed. The Michael Horn videos already had their thumbnails loaded because I opened its channel details shortly before taking the screenshot; before that, most of them were broken. But in the case of videos by Jarrad Morrow and The Linux Experiment, only the most recent ones had its thumbnail broken, which made me believe that the uploaders updating the thumbnail for those videos must've triggered the bug.

[acarasimon96]

Here is a more recent screenshot illustrating the bug, with Michael Horn (of course) and Destination Linux being affected

[acarasimon96]

It just happened again with Michael Horn, Jarrad Morrow, and one of The Linux Experiment and Michael Tunnell's latest videos. I probably should start calling this the "Michael Horn Effect" because his videos are most likely to be affected by this bug. 😆

PipePipe was updated to the latest version a few days ago on my phone.

[acarasimon96]

Not even Kurzgesagt is safe from the Michael Horn effect. Their latest video as of sending this comment is also affected by this bug.

[InfinityLoop1308]

1. The reason for the thumbnail disappearance is that the uploader updated the thumbnail, making the previously saved thumbnail link invalid.
2. To obtain the new thumbnail, the only way is to re-fetch the video information, which is a time-consuming operation that could take 5-10 seconds in worse cases.
3. If such "repairs" were done automatically, it would introduce completely unnecessary loading times. With multiple repairs, the time would be particularly unbearable, and re-fetching doesn't guarantee obtaining new thumbnails, as the video might have become invalid.
4. Most thumbnails don't have this issue, so manual handling is the best approach. The thumbnail will automatically update just by opening the upload channel or video information.