If you watched a YouTube video on your Android device today, you may may noticed something just a little different. If you haven’t, go check out the app in your drawer or homepage.
Google today pushed out an update to their YouTube app, but by all accounts, it was never meant to hit the public. This is labeled a dogfood build, which is a term used to describe products going through in-house testing, in effect “eating their own dogfood”.
If you’re YouTube app hasn’t updated, head to Google Play to grab the test build before it’s inevitably taken down.
A trip into the Settings reveal a new option titled Dogfood, as well as the term being used in the About page of the app, specifically the App version.
If you hit the Dogfood option in settings, you’re taken to options pertaining to ExoPlayer, which we first heard about through an ambiguous line of code in YouTube version 5.3 back in November.
It’s still unclear what this means—could it be some background player, possibly used for screen off playback? Maybe it’s a less resource intensive player to be used with weak data connections? At this point, your guess is as good as mine.
By checking the “Show ExoPlayer Debug Messages” option, you can see when the app uses the traditional “fallback” player versus the ExoPlayer.
The one tangible nugget in this updated version is the inclusion of a dedicated Playlist section in the sidebar, requiring a few less clicks to play a video from a playlist than it did in the previous version.
Hit a playlist, and you’re taken directly to it—nice!
Did you receive the update? Find anything new? Share with us in the comments below. It’s a given that Google will pull this, the only mystery is how it was released in the first place.
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