Summary
- YouTube’s Android app offers intuitive controls, including gestures for easy navigation and video playback customization.
- Google is testing an AI-powered double-tap-to-seek feature to jump to the most interesting parts of videos, with select Premium subscribers.
- This experimental feature may save time for viewers, but could limit creator earnings by skipping sponsor segments.
YouTube is among the leading entertainment apps on Android, and you should have minimal trouble navigating the platform to find suitable content. Even the video player controls are intuitive and comprehensive, featuring everything from translated captions to playback speed and quality controls. Gestures are a big part of the navigation convenience in YouTube’s Android app, and Google is currently testing an enhanced version of the tap to seek gesture.
On the current version of YouTube for Android, the double-tap gesture skips ahead or by 10 seconds if you tap on the right-hand side of the screen and backward 10 seconds on the left side. Every subsequent tap in quick succession seeks another 10 seconds. In 2021, Google introduced another double-tap gesture which allowed skipping to the next or previous chapter in the video with a two-finger double-tap gesture.
However, Google reasons that tapping repeatedly can become tedious. Moreover, there’s a chance you want to skip to the next segment which other viewers enjoyed the most, instead of the next chapter determined by the video uploader. YouTube’s latest experiment fuses AI smarts with user watch behavior data to make the double-tap-to-seek feature jump to the next most interesting part of a video (via 9to5Google).
The limited experiment could save time, but has downsides
Currently, YouTube is running this limited experiment for Premium subscribers in the US, even though we aren’t seeing it on the platform’s experimental feature catalog. Participants should see a new “jump ahead” prompt when they double-tap to seek and tapping the prompt will take them to the next most interesting bit.
Creators watching their own videos can also use this feature to hop between the content segments people like the most, even if they don’t have a Premium subscription. It could serve as a useful tool to identify the segments the audience enjoys the most. On the flipside, one could argue this feature encourages users to skip ahead and speed-run their way through videos, skipping out on creatively inserted sponsor segments which keep the lights on for creators.
Although there’s no assurance of this supercharged version of double-tap-to-skip making its way to the stable version of the YouTube app, Google might be onto something here, and we are excited to see the possibilities. While trials continue, you can tap and hold the progress indicator in the seekbar to see the most replayed sections of the video.
