Yeah, it could be better.

If you were to tap an embedded YouTube video on a web page, it would slide into full-screen view, and you’d watch it in all its glory. But, what if you want to mark it as a favorite? Perhaps you’d like to see who published it, or what commentary they posted with it. Of course, that’s kinda the point of YouTube: it’s a social video site.

But, alas, even though there is a dedicated YouTube app on iPhone, you aren’t given the choice to view the video in YouTube.app, where you could do all those things, and even subscribe to the publisher’s channel.

My recommendation would be to follow the example set by iPod.app: there’s a place for special buttons on either side of the volume slider. Just like the chapter select button, or the audio track select button, there could easily be an “open in YouTube.app” button in the plug-in’s playback interface.

As it stands now, we usually don’t even know the title of the embedded video. To get the info we seek, we have to guess at search terms based on the video content, and just hope that the video’s author properly tagged it with keywords.