YouTube’s playback bar is no longer just red

Android’s YouTube app makes changes to the playback bar. It has traditionally been red like the YouTube logo, but that is no longer standard. It is also sometimes white in color, if we can call white a color.

Playback bar on YouTube

More and more Android devices have it, also incognito: a white playback bar instead of red. Surprisingly, this only occurs on devices that use the app in dark mode and the reason would be that it is less noticeable and therefore disturbing when you watch a video. It is probably also a bit more accessible than red on dark.

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It occurs when you passively watch a video. It is a beautiful white-grey color, but there is also a disadvantage. It is no longer shown how much has already been loaded from a video, so you do not know whether it can go into a kind of choppy buffer mode at any time. Fortunately, you can easily do something about that: as soon as you tap the bar, it will turn red again and it will get a charging status again (via 9to5Google).

White-grey versus red

For now, it only seems to be about the bar and nothing else within YouTube that is naturally red. That probably won’t happen soon either, because red is the color of YouTube and to keep the app recognizable, that color will probably always predominate. If you don’t like that white-gray bar, it is recommended not to use the app in dark mode, but in light mode.

At the moment, this new color bar is probably still in a testing phase, so you may not have it in your YouTube app on Android. Or so it is, that it might disappear again at some point if it does not give the desired result.

Do you think it’s an improvement? Now leave it with this article.