YouTube forever changes one of the gestures you use most when watching videos on your mobile

After offering to get YouTube Premium, the application is testing a change that will generate a lot of rejection, because it Completely transform the behavior of one of your most used gestures: the one that goes down when playing a video in full screen.

It is not common for some widely used gestures to change from one day to the next, as this implies that mentally, the user must modify a behavior which was generated after daily practice for weeks or even years.

And a change like this can generate a lot of rejection being a gesture so anchored in the user’s memory with the aim of making them watch more videos, or with the idea of increasing the number of videos viewed from a platform (there are always different perspectives, that of the user and that which is practical for YouTube to improve its figures).

The YouTube product team performs gestures one after the other in the Android app.

Who the fuck wants to scroll through a long-form video? It was more useful to minimize/maximize videos.

As if fucking the in-app PiP wasn’t satisfying enough for whoever gets away with it. pic.twitter.com/1jY0XFbiMW

– Tushar Mehta (@thetymonbay) November 11, 2024

Tushar Mehta on his X account (formerly Twitter) discovered that YouTube on Android introduced a new scrolling gesture

for a full screen video player for long videos. In fact, it replaces the up-and-down gestures that were used to enter or exit the player’s full-screen mode.

Alvarez del Vayo

Free Android

With this change, making the same gesture when watching a long video, The next video will be broadcast in order to mimic the experience of YouTube Shorts videos in the YouTube app or TikTok itself.

YouTube’s logic for this change is that the user, instead of returning to the main video page go straight to the nextwhich will generate better statistics on video “engagement”, but it will generate a very strange experience for the user without knowing what is happening or if the application has an error.

What is not understood, according to Android FontThis is because the same experience of Shorts or TikTok is brought to long YouTube videos when the user intent is very different. A long video can last more than 5 or 10 minutes, so the average playing time per video is longer, while in Shorts, as they are short, the user prefers to watch them one after the other.