Summary
- The YouTube app is showing gray bars on full-screen videos, in a distracting change for users.
- The change affects videos displayed on AMOLED screens especially, but a fix is already in the works.
- The newest YouTube beta version has solved the problem, bringing back the preferred black bars.
Turned sideways, tall phone screens become great landscape displays for video content. But both phones and videos come in all manner of shapes and sizes, so to fill in the gaps when a video doesn’t fit just right, apps have to insert something on the sides. YouTube’s Ambient Mode fills the gaps with a sort of colored blur, but short of that, most people would agree that the correct something would be simple black bars that all but disappear on an OLED display. Recently, though, as spotted by Android Authority, the YouTube app has started inserting distracting gray bars instead. The change could be short-lived, though.
Several users have reported on social media that, even with the YouTube app’s Ambient Mode switched off, the bars on either side of YouTube’s full-screen video player are rendering as a gray color rather than the expected, preferable black. It might be difficult to see the difference in a screenshot, but you can see an example below.
The change is especially distracting on the AMOLED displays that the vast majority of Android smartphones have. But Android Authority further reports that the latest beta version of the YouTube app (version 20.13.32) has actually already solved the problem, restoring the black bars that should have been there all along.
A short-lived issue
If you’re experiencing these annoying gray bars in YouTube’s full-screen player, it does seem like a fix should be coming soon. Not only does the newer beta version of the YouTube app not exhibit this behavior, but the TeamYouTube X account has acknowledged the issue and says a fix is incoming. It may be a minor annoyance, but at least it’s a short-lived one.
