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 on the market, but the platform's push towards a better monetization strategy with more ads and higher YouTube Premium prices continues to annoy many users. If you've come to terms with recent changes to YouTube, there's probably another one coming that you might hate, as the app may introduce scrolling gestures for long videos.

Tushar Mehta on X (formerly known as Twitter) discovered that YouTube on Android has introduced a full-screen video player scrolling gesture for long videos.

This scrolling gesture appears to replace the up and down swipe gestures to enter and exit the full-screen video player. So if you're watching a full-screen video in landscape mode, you won't be able to minimize the video player with a swipe gesture like you can currently. With this change, swiping down on a long-form video in full-screen mode will play the next video, mimicking the app behavior we see for short-form videos in the YouTube Shorts tab in the YouTube app.

Right off the bat, I hate this gesture. It would mess with my muscle memory for long YouTube videos and make it harder to immerse myself in a video. Yes, there's still a button to enter and exit the full-screen player, but the swipe gesture is simple and doesn't require as much finger gymnastics on major Android flagships.

While the change appears to harmonize app behavior for long-form and short-form videos, it doesn't take into account the difference in use cases between them. I am more selective about the long content I click on and watch, while I watch short content without much thought. Therefore, the gesture of going to the next video is more appreciated on Shorts, but not so much on regular YouTube videos, considering that you can still go to the next video using the Next button. Gesture consistency will seemingly destroy a feature that has worked for years.

We assume this change is a limited test as we were unable to detect it on multiple devices. We were unable to find any support documentation or a release changelog highlighting this change.

We asked Google for comments on this test. We will update the article as soon as we hear from them.

Do you like this possible change? Let us know what you think in the comments below!