YouTube

Matching the desktop counterpart, YouTube in March announced a dark theme for its mobile apps. iOS received the update immediately, while YouTube for Android has been testing for the past several months. Today, it now appears to be rolling out to more users.

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With the prevalence of abnormal display aspect ratios lately, Google’s YouTube app has made a point of adding a “zoom to fill” mode to select phones. Now, that functionality has extended to the Essential Phone.

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Announced at I/O 2018, YouTube was one of the first products that launched Digital Wellbeing features like break reminders and notification management. Today, the Google video service is rolling out “Time watched” stats along with centralized controls for all the other options.

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At Samsung’s Unpacked event this morning, the company touted how the Galaxy Note 9 is a YouTube Signature Device, tuned to deliver a good video watching experience. This initiative is part of the Google video site’s new Device Report to test phones and work with manufacturers on creating a “best-in-class YouTube experience.”

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Not long after Apple kicked things off by pulling the plug on Alex Jones’ podcasts, Facebook followed suit with removing several of his brand pages. Now, YouTube has removed the Alex Jones channel from its site for “violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.”
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With YouTube Music now several weeks old and rolling out internationally, Google is ready to improve and regularly update the streaming service with new features. The music offering will see functionality updates every two weeks, with a number already on the product roadmap.

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After introducing a dark theme for Android last week, YouTube is now testing the ability to swipe through videos to quickly jump to the next one. This gesture is quite intuitive and faster than the current alternatives.

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Like it or not, vertical video is still a thing, and YouTube’s platform has a whole lot of it. While watching videos like this on the desktop, or in other aspect ratios, the video player adds some ugly black bars. Now, though, YouTube’s desktop player is adding a dynamic video player.

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Last March, YouTube officially announced a dark theme was coming to the Android and iOS app after first debuting on the revamped web version. It first rolled out to the iOS client and is now finally beginning to appear for Android users.

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YouTube’s user interface has changed a lot over the past year, both on mobile devices and on the desktop. Apparently, though, that redesign is causing issues with some browsers…

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YouTube has faced a lot of community backlash in recent months regarding experiments it runs without proper communication. Now, after comments from CEO Susan Wojcicki, we’re getting early insight on an experiment running now for some iOS users.

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The transition from music streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora and even Google Play Music to YouTube Music might seem confusing and daunting, but it’s actually pretty straightforward once you understand just how the system works.

We just spent a month with YouTube Music — comparing it directly with rivals Spotify and Pandora — and here are the five things we did to get the most out of Google’s latest streaming offering. For the love of lyric videos, make sure you do these things once you’ve signed up.

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Last month, we opined how YouTube could save a lot of creator frustration by just being more transparent, especially in regards to A/B testing of new features. CEO Susan Wojcicki acknowledged that today in a post that also provides a “mid-year update” on what the video site is working on.

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YouTube Music, the latest in Google’s long history of attempts at breaking into the music streaming market, launched last month in 17 countries. However, it may be too late for Google’s latest attempt at music streaming, as the competition is fierce between veteran services like Spotify and Pandora, newcomers like Deezer and Tidal, and of course Apple Music from Google’s biggest competitor. Since launch, we’ve been using YouTube Music extensively to see how it truly fares against some of these rivals.

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After rolling out an Incognito mode and full-width thumbnails to Android earlier this month, YouTube is now displaying hashtags on videos. Aimed at improving search for users, it is also available on the web.

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