We count YouTube and its subsidiaries including YouTube Music among thebest entertainment apps available on Androidtoday, but the battle of music streaming services is a heated one, with YouTube Music rivaling Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer, SoundCloud, and other big players. In its efforts to stand out from this tough competition, Google has blurred the line between the main YouTube app and YouTube Music a little, porting comments from the main app to YouTube Music.
Google has added a whole carousel of buttons, including one for comments, to the Now Playing interface on YouTube Music. However, this isn’t a surprise because we spotted ittesting in June this year. Now,9to5Googlenotes the UI change is rolling out widely on both Android and iOS. The album art is larger than before, but has been shifted up to make space for a horizontally scrolling carousel of buttons between the artist name and seek bar.
The old YouTube Music UI(left); Redesigned UI(right)
Source:9to5Google
The carousel has buttons toLike,Dislike(without a counter, of course), view or addComments,Save,Share, andDownloadthe track, or switch to itsRadio. Earlier, a bunch of these options showed up only when you tapped the album art. You can still tap the album art to go full-screen with the icon that shows up in the lower right corner, though. The new array of controls in the Now Playing screen make YouTube Music resemble the main YouTube app even more. In fact, the comments section that slides up is a replica of the comments you will find under YouTube videos. The styling hasn’t been modified for the YouTube Music app.
Besides the significant inclusion of comments in the Now Playing screen, YouTube Music also has smaller UI changes like the white Play/Pause button and music/video switcher at the top, which used Material You dynamic theming earlier. Even the name of the track and artist are left-aligned now, instead of center-aligned. All the other options remain in the overflow menu. This is a significant redesign for YouTube Music, but not one we expected Google to go through with, considering how Comments on the main YouTube app allow hate, brigading, and spam to fester.
In any case, YouTube Music may be the only music streaming app with an active comments section for a while before rivals catch up. We aren’t seeing the new interface on our devices yet, but 9to5Google reports it is rolling out gradually. If you’re running the latest version of the app, you’re able to try force-stopping and restarting it. Google also added other features likeSpotify-style live lyricsand theSamples tabto YouTube Music recently, further improving the overall user experience.
