YouTube is testing the worst change ever in its Android app

We have a love-hate relationship with YouTube these days. YouTube is undoubtedly the best video streaming service out there, but the platform’s push towards a better monetization strategy with more ads and higher YouTube Premium prices continues to irk many users. If you made your peace with recent changes to YouTube, there’s probably another one coming your way that you might hate, as the app could introduce scrolling gestures for long-form videos.

Tushar Mehta on X (formerly known as Twitter) spotted that YouTube on Android has introduced a scroll gesture for the fullscreen video player for long-form videos.

This scroll gesture seemingly replaces the swipe-up and down gestures to enter and exit the fullscreen video player. So when you are in landscape orientation watching a video in fullscreen, you will not be able to minimize the video player with a swipe gesture as you currently can. With this change, when you swipe down on a fullscreen long-form video, it will play the next video, emulating the app behavior we see for short-form videos in the YouTube Shorts tab within the YouTube app.

Right off the bat, I hate this gesture. It would mess up my muscle memory for YouTube long-form videos and will make immersing myself in a video more difficult. Yes, there is still a button to enter and exit the fullscreen player, but the swipe gesture is simple and doesn’t involve as much finger gymnastics on large Android flagships.

While the change seemingly harmonizes the app behavior for long-format and short-format videos, it fails to appreciate the difference in use cases between them. I am more selective about the long-form content I click on and view, whereas I watch short-form content without as much thought. So, a gesture to go to the next video is more appreciated on Shorts but not as much for regular YouTube videos, considering the fact that you can still go to the next video with the Next button. Gesture consistency will seemingly break a feature that has worked for years.

We presume this change is a limited test, as we could not spot it on multiple devices. We could neither locate support documentation nor a release changelog highlighting this change.

We’ve contacted Google for comments on this test. We’ll update the article when we hear back from them.

Do you like this potential change? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!