For over a year now, YouTube Music has been testing various Now Playing screen redesigns on Android and iOS.
Compared to the current stable UI, this latest Now Playing redesign uses icons for the “Song” and “Video” switcher. It’s cleaner and quite obvious, with this much better than variants that removed it entirely for just a button in the bottom carousel. This switcher has been part of YouTube Music for a long time, and removing would have broken muscle memory. It would have also deemphasized the music video library.
YTM is not rearranging the carousel, progress bar, and controls with this redesign. However, the bar is now rounded and loses the playhead. When you’re actively scrubbing, the line becomes thicker. It’s a good modernization that aligns with main YouTube.
The big change that’s being made is to the three bottom tabs. It’s just “Up Next,” which is renamed to the album, playlist, or mix you’re currently listening to. Google has removed the Lyrics and Related tabs. The latter is accessed by tapping the song name.
Lyrics functionality is moved into the carousel. Some designs place it right after the thumbs up/down pill, while others have it as the fourth item partially off-screen. The first design is better given its high usage.
This allows for a dual-pane view that combines controls and the queue. It is quite nice and a good idea, but inherently requires that other frequently used parts of the app are moved around.
Over the past few days, more people have seen this redesign, but it’s not yet widely rolled out. Hopefully, YouTube Music has settled on this design and this A/B testing, which started last November, can end.
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