The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has had governments worldwide enforce measures to contain the viral outbreak through lockdowns, quarantines and self-isolation. YouTube is seeing an increased amount of users consuming videos as people resort to online streaming sites at home to fight the boredom. The increased consumption has had YouTube resort to streaming videos at 480p resolution by default to ease the strain on internet infrastructure.

Even before COVID-19, YouTube was already limiting the video quality depending on the strength of your internet connection but the new policy seems like it will disregard whether your home bandwidth is more than capable of streaming a higher quality video.

Well, the good news is that the Google-owned giant video sharing platform is working on allowing users to pick a default video quality on its Android app. This means that if you set it to something like 1080p, every time you open the YouTube app, videos will be shown in that resolution.

In an APK teardown of YouTube for Android v15.12.33, it is seen that the app has added a new activity for a new setting page pertaining to video quality preferences, which suggests that users would be able to change the default video quality too.

YouTube is reportedly working on “Video quality preferences” (via @xdadevelopers) and this is what it looks like https://t.co/DsJ7O0SoWh pic.twitter.com/xpt2x5zPKa

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) March 25, 2020

YouTube has been rolling out new features for its Android and iOS apps since the year began like the new Explore Tab, Profile cards that show a person’s comment history and channel previews in the comment section.

However, don’t get your hopes up right away as YouTube may choose not to push this feature in the live build.

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