In October last year, YouTube lowered the eligibility criteria for community posts in an attempt to give more creators access to the feature. The platform previously required creators to have at least 1000 subscribers to create community posts but, starting October 12, it reduced this threshold to 500 subscribers. YouTube is now working on a new feature for community posts that could prompt more creators to use the feature.
An APK teardown can often predict features that may arrive in a future update of an application, but it is possible that any of the features we mention here may not make it in a future release. This is because these features are currently unimplemented in the live build and may be pulled at any time by the developers in a future build.
YouTube for Android received an update on the beta channel earlier this week, which includes a new string related to the upcoming feature. It is related to the polls feature in community posts, which lets creators share polls with their audiences. At the moment, the polls feature only lets you create text polls on the platform. But the new string suggests that YouTube could add support for image polls soon.
<string name="post_creation_quickstart_image_poll_button">Image Poll</string>
<string name="post_creation_quickstart_text_button">Text</string>
<string name="post_creation_quickstart_text_poll_button">Text Poll</string>
The ability to create image polls on YouTube is not live in the current beta release, and we were not able to trigger it manually. We expect to learn more about the feature in subsequent beta releases, and we'll make sure to let you know as soon as we have more information.
We're sure many creators on the platform will find the ability to create image polls quite useful. For instance, MKBHD could use it for his annual Blind Smartphone Camera test, for which he currently relies on Instagram alone now that Twitter has removed the beta feature that allowed users to post images next to polls.
Along with the image polls feature, YouTube is also working on bringing a Listen with YouTube Music button to more users and a dedicated voiceover feature for YouTube Shorts.