Why can’t we all have nice things?
Widgets are a fun, underrated way to interact apps that are awesome enough to implement them — apps like YouTube Music. But sadly, we haven’t seen the came kind of love for the regular YouTube app. Hopefully Google will get around to doing something about that soon, as Android users are about to start getting very jealous of the new YouTube widgets arriving for iPhones.
The first new iPhone widget, spotted by 9to5Google, is called Quick Actions, and claims to be the fastest way to search and browse YouTube. It takes up a 4×2 grid on the iOS home screen (full width and two rows), offering a search bar with voice support and dedicated buttons for Home, Shorts, and Subscriptions. This is only the latest place we’re seeing almost aggressively prominent Shorts placement, presumably in an effort to boost engagement. Tapping any of the buttons on the widget directly opens the corresponding tab in the YouTube app.
In addition to this big one, the app also now offers a square 2×2 widget with a just a search bar — and no mic to tap for voice search this time, either. Both new widgets have light and dark versions, which switch automatically to match the system theme.
The new widgets seem to be rolling out to almost every iPhone and iPad user who can update to version 17.40.5 of the YouTube app, but we’ve yet to see a trace of anything similar on Android, where we’ve got no widgets at all. But hey — at least we’ve got the Google Search widget to look up YouTube videos!
This is far from the first time Google seemingly prioritized iOS apps over Android development — a widget for Google Photos came to Android last year, only after its iOS debut. Don’t get us wrong, YouTube is definitely improving on Android with work on dark themes and Material You changes, but some widgets would be nice, Google. We hope these make their way to Android soon, ideally with Material You dynamic theming support.
