The day has come when YouTube is finally rolling out its autoplay (without sound, thank goodness) when you’re in the home page of the video sharing app. When they were testing it out it was called “Play as you browse” but now it’s officially called “Autoplay on Home” and it will basically still have the same function. As you browse the home feed, it will automatically play the video at the top of your screen so you’ll be able to sort of preview it before deciding whether or not to click on it.
When you go to your home screen, you will see the thumbnail first and then you’ll see a spinning loading indicator after a few seconds. You will also see a waveform to show you that there is sound in the clip and then of course you can unmute and mute it again if you want. If the video has captions, the subtitles will also appear as it’s autoplaying. If you tap on it, it will start playing with sound the usual way you’d play a YouTube video. But if the picture-in-picture player is activated, the autoplay will be disabled. It will also not autoplay in your subscription or search results.
Not everyone would want that autoplay feature of course and it’s practically easy to turn it off. Just tap on your avatar on the right hand corner of the YouTube Android app. Go to the settings and then head on over to the Autoplay section. You’ll see a new item listed called Autoplay on Home. You have three options: Always on (if you don’t mind the higher data usage), Wi-Fi only (if you like the autoplay but want to save on data), and off (if the autoplay feature annoys you).
Autoplay on Home is now live on several devices. You can update your YouTube app if you don’t see it yet or just wait for the update to get to you soon.
