Robert Triggs / Android Authority
TL;DR
- YouTube is testing additional design tweaks for its new mini player on Android.
- The updated design is available in the latest beta release, and it gets rid of the bottom bar with the forward, rewind, and pause buttons.
- It features a pause button in the top left corner and a button to close the mini player in the top right corner.
YouTube tested a new mini player redesign on Android last year, which was heavily criticized by users. It was rolled back after a few months, but YouTube later released it on the stable channel after fixing some of its more egregious issues. It seems like the platform isn’t done tweaking the mini player, as we’ve spotted an updated design in the latest YouTube beta for Android.
Instead of featuring prominent forward, rewind, and pause buttons in a bar at the bottom, the updated mini player features a pause button with a translucent background in the top left corner. The forward and rewind buttons are no longer available, but the button to close the mini player still occupies the same spot in the top right corner.
In our testing, we also found that the new mini player still supports the double tap to expand/shrink gesture and offers users the option to skip ads. The new mini player design is available on a few of our devices running version 20.18.32 beta of the YouTube app for Android, but it may be a while before it rolls out on the stable channel.
The new YouTube mini player design is a definite improvement over the previous version, especially since it no longer has an opaque bar covering a good chunk of the bottom half. However, we’d like to know your thoughts on the new changes. Do you prefer this iteration or would you rather have YouTube revert to the original bottom bar design? Let us know in the comments.
