Getting your comments out of Google Takeout

YouTube has no API that lists every comment you ever wrote. Your own Google Takeout export is the complete list; the app's other two options need no file but only cover part of it.

These are the same five steps the Comments screen shows inside the app, so you can follow them here on a laptop and finish on the phone.

The five steps

Open Takeout and deselect everything. Go to takeout.google.com and tap Deselect all. The page starts with every Google product ticked, which would produce an enormous export you do not want.
Tick only “YouTube and YouTube Music”. Scroll down the product list to that one entry and tick it. Leave everything else unticked.
Keep only “comments”. Inside the YouTube entry, tap All YouTube data included, deselect the rest, and keep only comments. This is what turns a multi-gigabyte export of your watch history and uploads into a small file.
Create the export. Continue to the end and start it. Google emails you a .zip when it is ready, which takes anywhere from a few minutes to several hours depending on how much you have written. Nothing to do until that mail arrives.
Save the zip on the phone and import it. Download the .zip onto the phone running Comment Sweep, open Comments in the app, and tap Import export. Pick the file. It is parsed on the device and is never uploaded.

What the app accepts

The whole .zip exactly as Google sent it — this is the easiest, and the app finds the right file inside it.
A bare comments.csv pulled out of the zip yourself.
The older my-comments.html format, for exports made when Takeout still produced HTML.

If something goes wrong

“The file was read but contains no comments.”

The export was valid but the comments part was not in it. That usually means step 3 went wrong and a different YouTube data type was exported instead. Repeat the export, and at the All YouTube data included screen make sure comments is the ticked one.

The mail has not arrived

Large exports genuinely take hours. Check the Takeout page itself rather than waiting on mail — it lists your exports and their state. If you asked for more than comments, the wait gets much longer, which is the practical reason for step 1.

You would rather not download anything

Two of the app's three options need no file at all:

My comments on one video. Paste a video link (youtu.be/…, a watch link, a Shorts link) or the bare short video id, and the app finds the comments you left under that video.
My comments on my own videos. Loads the comments and replies you left under videos of your own channel.

Both are limited to where you point them. Only the Takeout export is the complete list.

Is the file safe to hand to the app?

The export contains what you wrote, which is why it is worth being careful with it. Comment Sweep unzips it and reads it in memory on the phone. It is not copied to a server — there is no server — and it is not sent anywhere. See the privacy page for what the app does and does not do with it. When you have finished, deleting the downloaded zip from your phone is a reasonable thing to do.