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Even if you have one of thebest smartphones around, touchscreens can sometimes seem like a bane, especially when accidental touch inputs give you movie spoilers or kick you out to your home screen while you’re watching a video. Although the problem is compounded by larger screens, some of thebest entertainment appslike Netflix allow locking the screen to prevent interference from accidental touches. Now, we can confirm YouTube is following suit with its latest experiment.
Since the YouTube interface is heavily reliant on tap and swipe gestures to seek, play/pause, and skip videos, especially Shorts, locking the screen should help avoid unintentional gesture activation. Larger phones can also become uncomfortable to hold over longer durations, but a screen lock can allow you to relax your grip without affecting the media that’s playing.
The test is available until the end of July, but the feature doesn’t seem to be working for us. We will update this article if we glean more insight into how it functions, but it should make your devices a little less accident-prone. Meanwhile, there are several other media player apps like VLC and KM Player which support locking the gesture and tap controls so you can grab the screen comfortably. We would just suggest you choose the media wisely because pausing content in a hurry on a locked screen isn’t easy.
Thanks:Nick
UPDATE: 2025-06-11 09:03 EST BY DALLAS THOMAS
Feature is now live until August 5
YouTube’s screen-locking feature is now functional after the latest YouTube app update went live on the Play Store. Google has also updated its description of the feature on YouTube Labs to indicate the experiment will be available until August 5.
