For an app that is used by millions of users globally, YouTube does its job remarkably well. But that’s not always the case, as bugs pop up from time to time. Over the last few weeks, YouTube app users on Android have reported the appearance of a random “Auto Zoom” functionality that crops portions of the video in fullscreen mode. Thankfully, YouTube is already working on it, and a fix could be on its way soon.

In an APK teardown of the YouTube app for Android (version 20.32.32), the folks at Android Authority located strings that point to the inclusion of a dedicated toggle to enable or disable this auto-zooming functionality. In addition to this toggle, YouTube will also provide a clearer description of the feature, along with instructions on how to disable it from the settings page. Here are the strings in question:

<string name=”video_zoom_auto_zoom_snackbar_button_text”>Settings</string>

<string name=”video_zoom_auto_zoom_snackbar_text”>Auto zoom is on. You can turn this off in settings</string>

When auto-zoom is automatically applied to a video in landscape mode, a pill-shaped button appears just above the onscreen play/pause keys. While tapping this Auto zoom button brings the video back to its regular, non-zoomed state, it’s an additional step that the user didn’t ask for.

This auto-zoom bug doesn’t affect everyone

For what it’s worth, I haven’t faced this auto-zoom glitch on my Android device. However, it’s easy to imagine how this being enabled unprompted can hinder your viewing experience, especially if there are parts of the video that can’t be missed, such as subtitles.

It’s worth pointing out that this is unrelated to the existing “Zoom to fill screen” toggle in the YouTube app, which can be found by navigating to Settings > Playback. While there appears to be some confusion about these two features in the Reddit threads discussing this bug, the evidence uncovered by Android Authority suggests they are not the same.

As with most early feature previews, there’s no timeline available for its availability. However, we suspect it’s just around the corner, as several users have been facing this particular issue for nearly a month now.

Have you come across this auto-zoom bug on the YouTube app so far? Let us know below.