YouTube adds a new Shorts feature that you should probably avoid

By design, YouTube Shorts, just like Instagram Reels and TikTok videos, are all vertical videos. They’re meant to be consumed with your phone in portrait mode, fill the entire screen, and are designed to keep you swiping and watching more. Shorts are not meant to be consumed in landscape, but YouTube is now bringing that option as an accessibility feature to its mobile app.

An option for Rotate Shorts has shown up on my Pixel 9 Pro XL under YouTube’s Settings > Accessibility. When I enabled it, I noticed that if I rotate my phone to landscape mode and I have auto-rotate on for my entire phone, the Shorts will switch to a new landscape orientation with controls on the right and a scrub bar at the bottom. The video itself, because it’s been shot in portrait, looks so tiny and so impractical to watch on a modern phone display, especially with narrow ~20:9 display ratios. Watching Shorts like this feels as pointless as watching landscape YouTube videos while holding the phone upright.

When I disabled the setting, Shorts remained in portrait mode. Auto-rotate didn’t affect them, and even if auto-rotate was off, I didn’t get the force-rotate button that lets me momentarily switch my display to landscape.

Because of the bad use of screen estate and the obvious mismatch between display orientation and video orientation, my Android Authority colleagues and I tried to think of why exactly this option would exist. The only explanation we came up with is that it’s billed as an accessibility feature, so it’s not meant for most users. Perhaps people with motor disabilities who can’t keep rotating their phones will find it helpful; perhaps it works for those who mount their phones in landscape to watch videos and don’t want to or can’t reach out to turn it around. Before this setting existed, it must’ve been frustrating for those users to start playing a Short and realize the orientation was fixed and the only way to watch it was to turn your head sideways.

I also thought that this option would be perfect for tablets and foldables, but it turns out Google already fixed the issue on those devices, without needing the setting. A few years ago, Shorts would only play in portrait orientation, even if you were holding your tablet in landscape, but now they do offer a landscape UI similar to what’s rolling out on phones. And that UI gets activated by default when you’re holding the tablet horizontally — no need to enable the setting.

If you want to try this out, be sure to update to the latest versions of the YouTube app, though that’s not a guarantee. Google seems to be testing this as a server-side update; it’s live for me on v20.26.31 and above. Just make sure you don’t test it in bed like I did with auto-rotate enabled, because the Shorts will keep flip-flopping between portrait and landscape.