Taken straight from the Android TV app
For the longest time, YouTube has had a somewhat static splash screen that simply shows its logo when you first launch the app. But the company has been working on a new loading animation and startup sound in recent months. It rolled out the change on Android TV a while back, and now, some users are starting to see the flashy new interface in the YouTube app for Android.
Google spent a considerable amount of time and effort to create a modern three-second intro for YouTube that appears whenever you open the Android TV app. The quick loading screen animation went live for YouTube’s TV app in November last year, and it has now started appearing for some users on their favorite Android smartphones.
A Twitter user was recently welcomed by the new splash screen when they opened the YouTube app on their Android phone (via 9to5Google). While the intro looks very similar to the one you have seen on the big screen, complete with a seek bar animation, there are a couple of differences. The phone version reportedly doesn’t get the chime, and it also appears a second shorter than the one made for the TV app.
While it brings brand uniformity across apps, it still makes you wait an extra moment before you get to watch the video you opened the app for. However, you can take consolation in knowing that the animation will appear only on a cold app launch, so you won’t be seeing it all that often.
For the user who first spotted it, the new splash screen appeared on YouTube v18.16.33, which is currently a beta version of the app. But we couldn’t reproduce the intro animation in our own testing despite updating to a newer beta version, indicating it could be a server-side rollout. You can still give it a try by sideloading the update from APKMirror, otherwise you’ll have to wait for YouTube to push the update to your device through official channels, which could take a while.
