YouTube is Changing Video Settings and Player for Android

9To5Google

YouTube has been making a lot of changes recently and this latest one is just a few little tweaks for how the app looks and works on Android devices. They won't really affect how you use the app very much, but they do make the app a little less cluttered.

The main change is on video settings menu. The little option will remain in the corner of your video but how it pops up has changed. Whereas before it was  a transparent menu over the video, the background now turns grey and the menu pops up at the bottom of the screen in white. You can still see what's going on up there and where you've paused the video, but the menu is clearly the most important thing open right then. The menu stays like that if you switch to change the quality of the video as well. It's thought that these changes might have been made since the autoplay button that has been introduced otherwise clutters up the app. The menu does cover the autoplay button and the recommended videos so this does make sense.

The other change is to the red video bar that allows you to pause, skip and see how much longer you have next. Before you had to hover over the video, even when it was small for the bar to pop up. This was also apparently seen as too cluttered so there is now a consistent red bar at the bottom of the video when it remains small. The bar does still disappear if you have the video in full-screen mode fortunately so you can still enjoy clear videos. I guess it makes a little sense because the bar is now beneath the actual video, but I feel like a disappearing bar is a little less cluttered.

As well as this their new messaging feature is still in testing. It looks as if Google have been making a lot of changes to YouTube recently and that is interesting. They don't seem to be working on what people would like them too though like how bad the connectivity can be sometimes, how the ads can be an issue for mobile viewers and so on. Maybe they will get to this eventually as YouTube can be a pretty good app and it's nice to know that Google is continuing to work on it.

Rosina Brooker

Rosina is a Songbird writer with a degree in Creative Writing. She's trying to focus on her novel on the side but is glad to be playing around with apps and writing about them in the mean time! Follow her @Songbird_Rosina

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