In recent years, videos in vertical format have become the main protagonists of social networks. It all started with TikTok and Snapchat, but soon after, Instagram and YouTube started banking on this format, with Reels and with Shortsrespectively. Now traditional YouTube videos could also behave like Shorts.
If you use social networks, you already know this navigation gesture used on all these platforms: swipe up to move to the next video. This is the case on all social networks, but on YouTube this way of navigating the interface is limited to Shorts. Soon we could use this gesture to browse all videos, which would represent a radical change in the way we use the app. A change that, for many, will be for the worse.
YouTube is testing a new way to browse videos: TikTok style
Some YouTube users have detected a change when browsing the platform: in the YouTube application for Android, when playing a video in full screen it is possible to slide your finger from bottom to top on the screen to access another video, here’s how to do it. not only works in Shorts, but also It is possible to use this gesture in longer traditional videos. This was demonstrated by a video shared by Tushar Mehta on X/Twitter.
This change for now would be in testing phasewhich means only certain users of the YouTube app for Android would be able to use it. However, this represents a major change in YouTube’s navigation gestures.
So far, the gesture of swiping up on the screen when watching a video on YouTube serves two purposes: accessing the video playback bar (to advance the video to the section you are watching). ‘we wish to see), and to exit full screen mode with a simple gesture on the screen, without having to press a button (in addition to activating the player picture in picture).
Changing the use of the gesture to have a TikTok-like experience means you lose that very useful gesture for exiting full-screen playback, but in addition, it could also encourage rapid consumption of videos in a format that is not in most of it not available. be consumed in this way. In other words, people will leave a video faster if in the first few seconds you don’t feel “hooked”, even though these longer videos are generally not developed in the same way as shorter, more dynamic videos.
The only advantage of this change at the interface level is that the YouTube browsing experience will be more uniformsince the same gesture will serve the same purpose whether we are watching a short or longer video.
For now, this way of browsing videos on YouTube appears to be simply in the testing phase, and the company has not announced to date that it plans to make this change in the navigation of the YouTube application for mobiles. At the risk of sounding like a ‘old man shouting on a cloud‘, I hope it stays like this, as a test.
Cover photo | Xataka Android
Via | Android Authority
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