Key Takeaways
- YouTube for Android may soon allow users to share videos with custom timestamps, making it easier to skip to the relevant parts.
- The current mobile app lacks this feature, but a future version could let users manually scroll to the desired part and toggle the timestamp option.
- This update, similar to the web version, will enhance the user experience and streamline the sharing of time-stamped videos on YouTube.
YouTube is easily one of the best entertainment apps in the business, thanks to its vast collection of content. As you would expect, sharing is a key element of the YouTube experience, with the web and mobile apps making it fairly easy to send a video link to your near and dear ones. The web version of YouTube takes this a step further by letting users share the video with a custom timestamp, helping them avoid all the nonsense and get right to the relevant part. Unfortunately, the mobile version of YouTube doesn’t have this functionality yet, but that could change soon.
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Fresh reporting from 9to5Google has revealed an updated sharing mechanism within YouTube for Android, wherein the app’s share sheet contains a toggle mentioning the time/duration, depending on where you’ve paused the video. It’s unclear if there’s a specific version of YouTube for Android that triggers this feature. But I’m not seeing this on my Android smartphone just yet, suggesting that this is part of a test, likely among a small group of users.
The feature is far from perfect at the moment
The current YouTube share sheet (left) vs the updated share sheet with the timestamp toggle (middle and right)
Unlike the web version of YouTube, users can’t edit the minutes or seconds in the mobile app. This means you will have to manually scroll to the part of the video where you want it to start, tap the share sheet, and toggle the timestamp option. A somewhat lengthy process, but it’s still the easiest way to send a time-stamped video without leaving the mobile app.
This inclusion will make life easier for people who want the playback to begin from a specific part of the video, although there has always been a simple (but manual) workaround. As 9to5Google notes, adding the suffix &t= followed by the part/time you want the video to start (1h, 10m, 30s, and so on) will do the trick. So if there’s a video URL that looks like this, youtu.be/sH7j8S-rsG0, and you want it to start from the 3 minutes 20 seconds mark, add &t=3m20s to the end of the URL (youtu.be/sH7j8S-rsG0&t=3m20s).
Since we don’t have a lot of additional info on this discovery, it’s hard to tell when it will be widely available to all users. However, since this feature has been available for a while on the web version, it was only a matter of time before it made it to the mobile apps. Are you seeing this new timestamp toggle on the YouTube app’s share sheet? Let us know below.
