Last year,YouTube introduced a faceliftacross all the platforms it’s available on. Apart from embracing rounded corners a little more and adding new icons, the company also added a glow effect to the video player when using its dark theme, called “ambient mode.” While this was previously only at the top and bottom of videos when viewing the small horizontal preview on Android, it looks like Google is now experimenting with bringing it to the fullscreen video player.
We spotted the small but certainly noticeable design tweak in YouTube version 18.40.33 on theGoogle Pixel 8 Pro, though we haven’t been able to reproduce this on other phones running the same version of YouTube just yet, including thePixel 8. This suggests that this is not a tweak exclusive to the new Pixel series but rather a random a/b test that happened to hit our Pixel 8 Pro review unit only.
Google has gone full Apple with its display branding this year. The Super Actua name might deserve an eyeroll or two, but at least the panel is excellent. At 1,600 nits in high brightness mode (and 2,400 nits with HDR content), it’s a huge leap over last year’s model, and it shows.
— Android Police Phones Editor Will Sattelberg in ourGoogle Pixel 8 Pro review
The glow effect behaves pretty similar to how it does when viewing the small video player in vertical mode. It pulls the dominating colors from the edges of the video player with a small delay, displaying them as a subtle glow effect to the left and right. Naturally, this only happens when the video isn’t in the same format as your phone’s screen, but rather a narrower one like 16:9 or even 18:9. The former is a format most modern phones have left behind but that’s still the predominant one in media due to TVs and monitors usually sticking with it, so phones are usually left with black bars at the left and right when playing videos in fullscreen mode.
The effect is subtle on screenshots, but more noticeable on the phone itself. Screenshots from ourGoogle Pixel 6 retrospective.
Like with the glow effect in the smaller video player, you can easily turn it off by tapping the settings cog in the top right corner of the player and hitting the “ambient mode” option. When you do that, ambient mode will be turned off for both fullscreen and smaller videos. YouTube also brought ambient mode to its desktop version’s dark mode, where you can turn it on and off as needed via the settings cog.
While some people like the look this glow effects gives videos, emulatingimmersive TV backlights, it’s not a look that everybody loves. Some people find the glow plain distracting while a few desktop usersthought their displays were brokenwhen it first showed up.
Google is also currentlyrolling out YouTube’s new flashy splash screen animationto some people, which was previously limited to the Android TV version. When opening the app, it will display the YouTube logo as normally, which then quickly loses its red outline, moving the play icon in its middle to the left with a progress bar quickly extended from it towards the middle, with a red color filling it out as the app loads. The whole animation takes less than a second to complete and is part of a rebranding effort.
