Despite not having the same popularity as Spotify or Apple Music, YouTube Music is nevertheless working hard to establish itself as a serious rival. Though major features like podcasts were added to the app little over a year ago, YouTube Music’s engineers have been hard at work exploring new design aspects. Then, in December, we discovered that Google could make the lengthy list of controls smaller by adding big buttons to the overflow menu. The Play next, Save to playlist, and Share buttons on YouTube Music for Android are now largely larger.
This functionality is already available to a few members of the Android Police team, and this week’s 9to5Google article validated its development. As far as we can tell, these large buttons are limited to the overflow menu for songs. You may reach this menu by long-pressing the song from the homescreen or album, or by using the three-dot menu in the Now Playing interface.
In the meanwhile, at least in my experience, the previous user interface—minus the big buttons—remains accessible in the overflow menu for albums, mixes, and playlists. This seems reasonable since various large buttons would be needed for album and playlist overflow menus, with at least one perhaps designated for Shuffle play.
While it’s unknown whether Google intends to modify this in the future, the big buttons are currently restricted to certain tracks. Moreover, these buttons are not visible in podcasts. It is important to note that in January, YouTube Music was testing the use of Start radio as one of the three options. However, in the upgraded version of the app, Save to playlist has taken its place.
There are only six more choices below the song overflow menu now that these buttons have been added, ranging from Start Radio to View song credits. Regular listeners will find this approach very helpful, and we hope that it will ultimately extend to albums, mixes, podcasts, and other content as well. It’s interesting to note that the 9to5Google post referenced earlier offers up to eight choices underneath the huge buttons, even though we can only see six of them now. This suggests that the makeover may still be ongoing.
