YouTube

YouTube begins testing new upload icon and position on mobile

Damien Wilde | Jul 31 2020 - 5:18 am PT

YouTube is testing a new upload icon and icon positioning on the mobile app to help improve and streamline uploads from your smartphone.

The current position in the upper right next to the search button (and Chromecast “Cast” icon) isn’t the most intuitive, and so YouTube is moving the button to a new location within the Android application. As with most YouTube experiments, the new upload button and location will only be available to a very small number of selected users. You may already have the option or have seen it on your mobile device.

If you’re chosen to take part, on your mobile you’ll see a new upload button within YouTube for Android right in the middle of the bottom navbar that resembles a “+” sign. The added button on the bottom navbar will see certain UI elements shift, with the Subscriptions feed shifting right every so slightly. Notifications will also move up to the top tab according to the official YouTube experiments support thread — but we have yet to see this on any of our devices to confirm.

Testing a new icon and icon location to create and upload videos on [YouTube] mobile: To make it easier to upload videos on mobile, we’re testing out a different spot and an updated look on the app for uploading videos. In our design studies, we found that creators think the current placement for creation is not intuitive, so we are testing a new placement of the icon with a small group of users.
If you’re in the experiment you’ll find the new upload icon in the middle of the bottom bar with a universal + sign. You can still easily access Subscriptions (one spot to the right) and Notifications (in the top bar) — nothing is changing with the functionality of any of these icons/tabs. This experiment is available to a small percentage of people on the YouTube app on Android devices, and we’ll consider rolling it out more broadly based on your feedback.

This experiment is limited to YouTube on Android and there are obviously no guarantees that any changes made to uploads on mobile will stick or come to a stable build of the video streaming platform. If you do upload videos from your smartphone directly to YouTube, this might streamline the process, but given that many creators upload from desktop or laptop, we’re not sure just how this change might be received.

Again, we’re not sure why you would want to upload unedited videos directly from your mobile device to YouTube, but with a growing number of high-quality, non-linear video editing apps on Android, this might prove to be a step in the right direction.

If you have seen the option on your device, be sure to let us know down in the comments section below.