YouTube Music for Android cleans up settings, starting on tablets

Abner Li | May 30 2022 - 11:52 am PT

Pixel Buds A-series earbuds placed upon the display of a Pixel 5 running YouTube Music that is playing Kanye West "On God".

At the start of this year, YouTube Music updated its Home feed for tablets and promised that more UI optimizations are coming, especially for playlists. One smaller change sees YouTube Music offer an improved settings layout on Android.

On Android tablets (and Chromebooks), opening the Account menu triggers a pop-up (thus preserving navigation context) instead of the fullscreen page found on phones.

Settings now makes use of a two-column UI that’s pretty standard across first-party Android apps: Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, and more. The actual controls appear on the right, while the list of what’s available remains on the left.

You no longer get one long list of toggles and menus but rather preferences that are thematically grouped: General, Playback, Data saving, Downloads & storage, Notifications, Privacy & location, Recommendations, Paid memberships, and About YouTube Music. The settings shortcut in the Library page opens preferences to the correct menu.

Tablet settings

This is a much better approach as settings for YouTube Music have been unwieldy for some time now as more things were added. We’re not encountering it on Android phones today, but YouTube Music offers a similar list approach on iPhone and iPad, though with different groupings. It could also be coming to smaller Android screens as a result.

Phone settings