YouTube’s new autoplay behavior is already triggering thousands of users

YouTube is definitely one of the vital extensively used leisure apps, and there’s solely a handful of stuff you’d anticipate it to do properly. Mainly, what most customers anticipate from YouTube is to play movies to your liking with out force-feeding what it deems popular. Generally it performs movies with out you explicitly asking for it. Whilst you get the choice to prevent videos on your feed or recommendations from auto-playing, the performance now appears to be creeping up on customers each time they launch the app on Android gadgets.

Giant droves of YouTube customers are complaining of a difficulty the place paused movies begin auto-playing the second you launch the app on Android after a break. For many of these affected by this subject, together with me, movies begin replaying from the start instantly after the app is relaunched after not getting used for a number of hours. It often doesn’t happen should you launch YouTube simply moments after closing it.

In a single YouTube Help thread, over 3,000 customers affirm having points with this conduct, and its scale suggests it won’t even be a bug however a characteristic supposed by Google.

For me, it’s completely nightmarish as a result of I take advantage of YouTube to lull me to sleep by taking part in solely reasonably participating podcasts, wind-down audio tracks like guided mediations, or binaural beats. I typically use a sleep timer, whereas protecting video autoplay turned off. And so, I’m nearly all the time greeted with the identical video ranging from the start each time I open YouTube the subsequent morning.

It’s much more galling to suppose I pay for YouTube Premium so I can use it within the background fairly than having to maintain the display off, however as an alternative get handled to damaged and/or undesirable performance. Notably, the difficulty additionally seems to vex non-paying customers who merely shut the app as an alternative of closing the video first.

Throughout the tons of of feedback I see throughout totally different sources linked above, YouTube’s autoplay tendencies seem to have originated at the very least a couple of months in the past; the earliest stories come from March, and it seems to be progressively increasing. I began experiencing them solely final week, which impressed me to research their (huge) extent.

At the very least one particular person seems to have discovered aid by uninstalling and reinstalling YouTube, and one other seems to substantiate it fixes it for them. I’ve passed by their suggestion and might be observing it over the subsequent a number of hours.

Notably, YouTube is not any stranger to unintended autoplay conduct. Final 12 months, for example, the YouTube app on Android started auto-playing the top video in customers’ feeds. Whereas it was initially considered a bug, YouTube later confirmed it was a brand new characteristic being examined.