YouTube and Android 2.3

This article is not entirely a resolution. Its main content (further below) is a reply I wrote in a thread on Google Product Forums, but I thought to post it here first, because I can add links and more context.

What follows at this point, is what people might be looking for first.

Update: Since 30.12.2017, the YouTube app works again. Yay.
The original text will remain below.

So, the YouTube app does not work on Android 2.3 Gingerbread and below, and shows "Error 410".

For me, the currently working resolution in Android 2.3 is to use the mobile YouTube site in the default browser ("Internet"), which sends the YouTube stream to the built-in video player app. It works, but is impractical.

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As of December 2017, Android 4.0 ICS is the earliest major version of Android still supported by the official native YouTube app. The app must be up-to-date, and version 11.01.70 certainly works.

This I found out, when I was granted access to a phone that runs Android 4.0.3.

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Since Android 2.3 typically runs on lower-specced devices, then Firefox for Android is unlikely to work as a player conduit for YouTube.

That's because on low-end devices, Firefox can be a resource hog even when configured in conjunction with the NoScript extension to be as resource-unintensive as possible.

Nevertheless I consider Firefox on Android 2.3 with NoScript to be like a life-saver, expecially when many modern websites have refused to load in the default browser.

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13.01.2018: It should be note, that on the basis of 2 billion monthly Android users (as of May 2017), the 0.4% of active Android 2.3 Gingerbread users make up about eight million people, which is the population size of several countries.

The forum thread reply:
The particular Android 4.0.3 phone I did research with, only has the YouTube app updated, and Google Play Services, too. (The latter auto-updates in the backround.)

Other apps in the device are not, and were never updated. — That was mostly through a stroke of curious unluck: As far as I could tell, the phone's owner never signed into his Google account linked to the device for the entire time he'd been using the phone. The Android UI did ask for account sign-in all the time, but the owner dismissed the notifications. So, this prevented automatic updates and upgrades to Google Play Services, and prevented automatic updates and upgrades of all of the other built-in apps in the device.

Then I came around and resolved the account issue. That fix enabled automatic updates of Google Play Services, and enabled access to the Google Play Store, where I quickly disabled automatic updates of apps.

Note, that Google Play Services is a core component of official Android, and therefore it's one of the few components for which automatic updates cannot be disabled.

Some of the Google apps in that phone might already have some updates applied, but they are not in their latest versions (Google Maps, Hangouts, etc.). Then I only updated YouTube—mostly in order to find out and report if at least Android 4.0 is supported.

The particular device I was checking out, has an 800 MHz single-core CPU, and 512 MB RAM. That's not a lot, but even nowadays, low-end phones with only that much RAM memory are still being sold as new.[1]

Such phones are good for just one or two apps at a time, and users would be well-advised to prioritise which apps they want to keep. For example, YouTube is a major go-to app. Facebook has an official lite version of its app available; others services, like twitter, offer mobile-friendly and lite versions of their website, if the default browser is too old.

Users should also close the apps they are not using at any particular moment.

In Androids ca version 4.x, long-pressing the Home button lists all the open apps; swiping apps to the right closes them. In newer Androids, single-pressing the Menu button shows the rolodex of any open apps; these, too, can be closed by swiping them to the right.