YouTube is testing a way to protect your stream getting ruined from accidental touches

Even if you have one of the best smartphones available, touchscreens can occasionally feel like a pain, especially if unintentional touch inputs cause you to glimpse movie spoilers or exit a video while you’re watching it on your home screen. Larger screens make the issue worse, but some of the greatest entertainment apps, like Netflix, let you lock the screen to prevent accidental touches from interfering. We can now establish that YouTube is doing the same with its most recent experiment.

Aside from advantages like ad-free playback and high-bitrate streaming, YouTube Premium also enables users to test out upcoming features before they are made available to the public through YouTube Labs. Recently, the Android Police team’s premium subscribers observed YouTube testing a brand-new feature that permits locking the screen while playback is in progress.

Locking the screen should help prevent accidental gesture activation because the YouTube interface extensively relies on tap and swipe movements to seek, play/pause, and skip videos, especially Shorts. Larger phones can also get unpleasant to hold for extended periods of time, but a screen lock can let you loosen up without interfering with the material that is now playing.

The functionality doesn’t appear to be functioning for us during the test, which is accessible through the end of July. This article will be updated once we learn more about how it works, but it should help reduce the likelihood of accidents involving your devices. Other media player apps, such as VLC and KM Player, lock the tap and gesture controls so you can comfortably hold the screen. Just remember to pick your material carefully because it can be challenging to quickly pause it on a locked screen.