Abstract
- The YouTube app for Android offers intuitive controls, including gestures for easy navigation and customization of video playback.
- Google is testing an AI-powered double-tap search feature to jump to video highlights, with select Premium subscribers.
- This experimental feature may save time for viewers, but may limit creators’ earnings by skipping sponsored segments.
YouTube is among the leading entertainment apps on Android, and you should have minimal trouble navigating the platform to find relevant content. Even the video player controls are intuitive and comprehensive, with everything from translated descriptions to playback speed and quality controls. Gestures are a big part of the navigation convenience of YouTube’s Android app, and Google is currently testing an improved version of tap gestures for search.
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YouTube is full of useful tricks
On the current version of YouTube for Android, the double-tap gesture skips forward or 10 seconds if you tap the right side of the screen and back 10 seconds to the left side. Each subsequent tap in quick succession requires an additional 10 seconds. In 2021, Google introduced another double-tap gesture that made it possible to skip to the next or previous chapter in a video with a two-finger double-tap gesture.
However, Google feels that repeated tapping can become tiresome. Moreover, there is a possibility that you want to skip to the next segment that other viewers enjoyed the most, instead of the next chapter determined by the video uploader. YouTube’s latest experiment combines clever AI with data on users’ viewing behavior to make the double-tap feature jump to the next most interesting part of a video (via 9to5Google ).
A limited experiment might save time, but it has drawbacks
Currently, YouTube is running this limited experiment for Premium subscribers in the US, although we don’t see it in the platform’s experimental feature catalog. Participants should see a new “jump forward” prompt when they double-tap to search, and tapping the prompt will take them to the next highlight.
Creators watching their own videos can also use this feature to jump between segments of content that people like the most, even if they don’t have a Premium subscription. It could serve as a useful tool to identify the segments that the audience enjoys the most. On the other hand, one could argue that this feature encourages users to skip ahead and fast-forward through videos, skipping the creatively inserted sponsor segments that keep the light on for creators.
While there’s no guarantee that this beefed-up version of the double-tap to skip will make it to the stable version of the YouTube app, Google could be on its way, and we’re excited to see the possibilities. While trials are running, you can tap and hold the progress bar on the search bar to see the most played parts of the video.