YouTube is a really popular social network with over 1.5 billion monthly active users, and unlike Facebook, they don’t usually push updates as much as the latter. However, recently they added few things like Community where creators can connect with their fans and a dark mode on desktop that aids in late night viewing.
Now thanks to an APK teardown by 9to5Google, YouTube is planning to launch some features later on, which includes the likes of a dark theme mode and incognito mode.
The dark theme mode was first beta tested on the web version and later on rolled out to all users when YouTube rolled out a new design. 9to5Google was able to find a string within the YouTube for Android apk (13.01) that highlights a Dark Theme which you can use throughout the app. This could be implemented like how we do it on desktop through a toggle.
The other feature the publication found out was Incognito mode. Incognito mode allows you to watch videos without leaving a history behind, and currently the only way to turn off history (both watch and search) is by heading over to “History and Privacy” in settings.
Other cool features found in the teardown includes a feature to swipe to skip an ad, which is a better implementation than the tapping to skip and ad. The other feature is the reorganization of the autoplay toggle where it will be given its own menu rather than being listed under General.
We hope that YouTube enables these features soon, but don’t get your hopes up.
