YouTube is experimenting with playing videos as soon as the app is opened to introduce content to its users. But the latter are far from satisfied with this new feature, considered intrusive and irrelevant.
Several users report that YouTube has started automatically playing videos when the app is opened. Before they could even navigate to their home screen, they saw a video launch on their device, without any action on their part.
At first, we thought it was a bug. But it was actually a Google experiment. When asked about it by Android Authority, the company confirmed that it was testing a new feature aimed at “helping us discover content”. The platform is undoubtedly aiming to strengthen user engagement by imitating services like TikTok and Instagram, which provide more instant access to content than YouTube currently does.
YouTube is testing autoplaying videos when the app is opened
“I opened the YouTube app on my Samsung phone today and a video started playing immediately. I checked that autoplay was turned off and restarted the app, but that didn't fix anything,”, one user wrote on Reddit. There is indeed an option to turn off autoplay, but it's intended for videos that start playing after watching a previous piece of content. This feature is currently not useful for solving this problem of video being played as soon as the app is opened.
Another user explains that this new phenomenon contributes to “disrupting [his] algorithm”. Not only is he not interested in the videos that are imposed on him, but in addition these are taken into account in YouTube's recommendations to suggest videos to watch, degrading his experience on the platform.
Uninstall the most recent updates to return to An older version of YouTube seems to allow you to get rid of autoplaying videos when opening the app. Clearing the app's data and cache may also help with this. Source: Android Authority
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