For example on desktop if you skip through a video while it's set to auto (1080p) at some point it will fall down to 480p. Maybe because YouTube thinks your connection has an issue, or maybe they just want to save bandwidth. If you manually set it to 1080p it stays there.
The player prioritizes smooth playback over quality. If you're skipping through, you're bypassing any buffer it's built up, so it'll drop the quality in order to be able to actually start playing sooner.
But they do.
For example on desktop if you skip through a video while it's set to auto (1080p) at some point it will fall down to 480p. Maybe because YouTube thinks your connection has an issue, or maybe they just want to save bandwidth. If you manually set it to 1080p it stays there.
The whole thing is annoying.
The player prioritizes smooth playback over quality. If you're skipping through, you're bypassing any buffer it's built up, so it'll drop the quality in order to be able to actually start playing sooner.