YouTube is rolling out somewhat of a major change to the video watching experience on mobile devices, starting first with iOS.

YouTube now lets you swap between videos to switch between videos, reports TechCrunch. You can swipe forward to start watching the next recommended forward and swipe backward to go back to the video you were watching. The experience works when you are on fullscreen, and when you are not.

The swiping experience is actually kind of intuitive, instead of manually finding a video from the Recommended list, you can simply just keep switching until you find what you want to watch. It’s kind of like the way Stories are implemented on apps like Instagram and Snapchat, but for YouTube.

The cool thing is when you swipe backward and go back to a video you were watching, it will simply start playing where you left off.

YouTube says 70% of its viewing is taking place on phones, so its mobile apps are kind of a big deal in 2019. And the company has been heavily focused on mobile devices in recent times, introducing new features like a dark mode, in-app video sharing and messaging, its own take on Stories, and more.

The changes are crucial at a time where there’s a new YouTube-related controversy almost every month, and although these changes are welcome, they certainly aren’t going to help with the controversies that are bringing down YouTube’s core community.

Tagged with YouTube