At the top of the month, Google announced its Android Feature Drop for winter, delivering new updates for Google Photos, Android, and Wear OS. As part of the update, Google showed off new home screen widgets for YouTube, featuring Android's Material You design language. Now, it looks like the widget is rolling out to users, so you can start customizing your home screen and taking advantage of quick access buttons for YouTube.

The new widgets for YouTube are pretty good if you're a person that wants to hop into content instantly. The first and probably better of the two takes up quite a bit of room, requiring at least a 3 x 2 section of your home screen. The widget has a dedicated YouTube search bar, and shortcuts to Home, Shorts, and Subscriptions. If you're able to stretch the widget out a little more, expanding it to a 4 x 2 section, it will show an extra icon that will allow you to gain quick access to your Library.

The second widget takes up a 4 x 1 section and is just a search bar for YouTube. While both can be useful, the expanded option will probably give you more functionality in the long run. If you're an avid YouTube watcher, this widget is great and can give you easy access when you just want to hop into some content instantly. Of course, you will have to sacrifice some screen real estate for it though. If you are interested in the new widget, just make sure to update your YouTube app through the Google Play Store.

While it looks like different versions come with the widget, we saw it appear with version 17.48.40, while the folks at 9to5Google saw it on version 17.46.37 on Pixel phones. For the most part, as long as you update to the latest version of the app, you should have access to it.


Source: 9to5Google