Long ago when there was a huge bandwidth increase throughout India, Youtube restricted the video playback in Android and iOS devices aj the majority of Youtube users were using smartphones. This was due to the quarantine and lockdown which was imposed by the Indian Govt to contain the spread of COVID in the country.
Due to the lockdown, there was a huge bandwidth increase on Youtube and on all the Mobile operators due to which Youtube limited the watch quality of the video on Android and iOS devices. This particular thing disabled the 720p and 1080p quality videos for all smartphone users. This was for both Wifi and Mobile Data users. The maximum limit to play videos on the smartphone was set to 480p which was considered as a bad quality for some users.
After a couple of months, the ban on quality has been lifted from Youtube and now all the users can watch videos on Full HD 1080p without any issues. The most important catch which is imposed from today is only the Wifi users can benefit from this feature. The company believes that lockdown is still not over for the people and it could still affect the traffic if too many people are using Mobile Bandwidth so users cannot watch 1080p videos on mobile data.
Until your device is running on Wifi, you can play videos on your smartphone on 1080p but as soon as you change it to cellular data, the videos will play on 480p as default which is not changeable.
The desktop users remain unaffected as this restriction wasn’t enabled for them. They had the freedom of playing video in 1080p since the start. If you’re a desktop user, you don’t need to worry about it as nothing is effected for you. There might be some improvements in the future since Google has invested $10bn for the Digitization in Inda.
Source
