YouTube is among the leading online video platforms, and nowadays, mostly due to the pandemic, we are addicted to YouTube videos to spend the recently discovered bundles of spare time. YouTube channels received a hallmark of subscribers and views during the quarantine. It is still a significant source of information and is instrumental in boosting our knowledge. Onus is on the viewer as what kind of knowledge they intend to gain.
If you are an Android user, chances are that you got the YouTube app pre-installed on your phone. Did you recently notice any change in the video player bar? But before that, you need to know what is seek bar?
Video seek or progress bar
The video progress or seek bar shows the time progress of a video and it also makes it simple to check where you left off the last time you viewed a video. When you leave a video without completing it, a red bar under the video thumbnail gives you the relevant point where you left off. At the point when you play the video once more, it will restart from where you were.
The progress bar is accessible when:
- You are logged into your Google Account on your smart TV, your PC, or the YouTube versatile applications
- Your watch history is on (not halted).
Pro Tip: Clearing your watch history will likewise clear all progress bars
At the point when you select a popularly watched video, the video will typically continue from where you left off. There are situations when the video won’t restart from the point you left off, generally when the video is almost finished.
Changes in App: Google has made a change in the YouTube app for android users. Now, you shall not be able to skip forward or backward by tapping on the seek bar. iOS has this feature already, so it’s not a new thing for iPhone and iPad users. It is a new feature for Android users. YouTube experience will be more consistent across different platforms.
Instead of tapping the seek bar, you will have to press and slide your finger across the video if you wish to move forward or backward. The prime objective of this feature is to eliminate accidental touches on the seek bar, which may sometimes ruin the content viewing experience. However, you will need to put in extra efforts to move forward and backwards, as skipping quickly just by tapping on the seek bar is now gone.
Users noticed a change in their youtube apps, and experts confirmed it by suggesting that this feature helps avoid “frustration with accidental taps.”
This feature was first seen in Android phones in 2018 when YouTube fixed it by saying it was a buggy issue. It looks like developers are now considering it useful to eliminate frustrating accidental scrubs.
Drawbacks to the new feature
The seek bar’s new behavior makes a lot of sense on paper, but it is buggier than the 2018 version in real use. It has the following drawbacks.
- There is no tutorial on it plus no indicator alerting you that you can’t use tap to seek, which would’ve helped understand the issue.
- It takes extra effort to move forward and backward.
- Many people think it is a bug and doesn’t support this idea of removing the tap’s ability.
Many users have reported against this behavior on google support forums and Reddit, and there is no answer to their queries. People found its buggy-looking behavior disturbing whenever they want to enter the full screen.
The new seek bar conduct seems, by all accounts, to be turning out as a server-side change, so we don’t have an APK to share that will mysteriously cause it to show up. In case you’re especially irritated by the missing tap-to-scrub usefulness, you can attempt to return to the pre-installed version of YouTube on your cellphone by uninstalling all updates. However, remember that you may miss out on new features and that older versions could eventually quit working, as well as potential security threats.
Question: Why are you altering the seek bar/scrubber experience? I can’t tap to move the seek bar/progress bar/scrubber for reasons unknown
Possible Answer: It was observed that a single accidental tap to move the progress bar caused a lot of annoyance. Now you can tap, hold, and move the progress bar — the red dab will follow your movement, and once you lift your finger, the video will hop to that point in the video.
The new feature in the YouTube apps on Android devices looks practical on paper, but in real use scenario, we at Geeknizer found it complicated and not helpful, and would prefer sticking to the older version of the YouTube App.