The 5 YouTube app tricks you aren’t using, but really should

• Making Watch Later your daily stream
• Refreshing to make the app remember where you were
• Disabling Autoplay
• Sharing from the midway point in a video

I’m loath to admit it, but it’s hard for me to imagine living without YouTube. I don’t have access to YouTube TV where I live, but otherwise, I legitimately depend on the service for everything from tech and fitness information to getting to sleep. Arguably, without being exposed to them so often through videos, I probably wouldn’t be riding electric unicycles.

As you’d imagine, I’ve come to learn a few tricks for getting the most out of the YouTube app on my devices. My experience is primarily with the iPhone, iPad, and TV apps, but these should also apply to Android and (sometimes) the web, since Google likes to maintain a consistent experience across platforms. The company wants everyone watching as much as I do.

Making Watch Later your daily stream

A true sit-back experience

Based on how aggressively it injects ads if you don’t pay for YouTube Premium, Google seems to work on the assumption that most people only watch one or two videos at a time. But that doesn’t lend itself to couch or bedtime viewing, not when many individual videos are under 20 minutes long. You’ll end up constantly hunting for new material, or at the mercy of Autoplay, which could end up dragging you into unwanted territory. More on that later.

The best away around this is your private Watch Later playlist. This is built into every YouTube account, but a mistake you might be making is treating it as a scattershot backlog of bookmarks. Instead, I like to use it as a daily playlist — whenever I go through my Home and Subscription feeds, I’ll tap the triple-dot icons to build a collection of things I’m ready to watch. Once I’m satisfied, I open Watch Later and click on whichever video I want to begin with.

As need be, you can use the handle (double-line) icons to rearrange the order in which things play, or hit Shuffle if order doesn’t matter. All this might seem tedious to some of you. If you like to watch YouTube for hours at a time, however, this will save you some later hassle, and maybe even improve your Autoplay recommendations.

Refreshing to make the app remember where you were

No more memorizing timestamps

You’ve probably noticed by now that if you start watching a video, but don’t finish it, you’ll sometimes find a partial red bar under it when you’re browsing through your feeds (see the Watch Later screenshot in the last section). The idea is that if you tap on this video again, it’ll resume playing where you left off, saving you the trouble of scrubbing until you remember where you were.

The problem, however, is that YouTube can randomly forget this information. The issue is frequent enough that with longer videos, I’ve taken to making a mental note of timestamps. I’m not sure what causes this — it could be a caching issue, but if so it’s clearly a severe one, since it happens on every platform.

If you’re looking to resume a video, check the state of those red bars before you tap on anything. If a bar is full when it shouldn’t be, refresh your view — in the phone and tablet apps, you can do this by swiping down and releasing. With the TV app, you may need to close and re-open it.

Your time is valuable

Sponsorships are a necessary evil for a lot of YouTube creators. Google doesn’t share as much ad revenue as it used to, so creators who actually want to make a living are dependent on in-video ad reads, or else crowdfunding through platforms like Patreon. The good news is that if your viewing time is limited — or you just don’t have the patience to hear about another VPN or phone accessory — there’s sometimes an easy way to skip ahead without missing the actual content of a video.

While you’re watching, keep an eye on the red progress bar. If that bar is interrupted by black lines, that means the creator has divided it into chapters. If an ad read or crowdfunding promo starts, you can usually fast-forward to the next chapter marker without worrying about missing anything. In some cases, creators will be kind enough to mark ad reads as their own separate chapters.

Some creators have taken to adding their own onscreen progress bars (or wheels) when a sponsored segment pops up. Keep an eye out for these — all you need to do is scrub until the bar or wheel disappears.

Disabling Autoplay

A feature for Google, not viewers

Frankly, Autoplay is horrible. Its algorithms either play it all too safe or, as I mentioned, gradually lead you into content you don’t (or even shouldn’t) care about. If it’s not manosphere or alt-right material, it might just be an unusually loud video that wakes you up at 3AM after your regular playlist ends. Really, the feature is more for Google than it is for me or you — the more videos you see, the more ads the company can serve.

Disabling Autoplay is simple, thankfully. In the iOS, Android, and iPadOS apps, tap the video area to bring up its playback controls, then flip the toggle with a Play/Pause button in the upper-right corner. In a computer’s web browser, you should see a similar toggle (possibly in a different location) when you mouse over the video field. Alternately, on phones, tablets, and TVs, you should be able to navigate to a Settings -> Autoplay menu. With mobile devices, you’ll have to tap on your profile icon first.

There are a couple of important notes here, the first being that Autoplay is device-specific. If you disable it on your phone, that won’t affect settings on your PC, and vice versa. Also, Autoplay halts after a certain duration anyway — four hours on Wi-Fi, or 30 minutes on cellular. Indeed, any playlist may stop prematurely if Google’s software senses that you’re not paying attention anymore. I’ve had overnight playlists on my Nest Hub stop far short of the four-hour mark.

Sharing from the midway point in a video

More limited than it should be

This is a quick one, but well worth talking about if you’re not familiar. When I share a YouTube video with someone, it’s often just for a single moment in the clip. Even if I think most of the video is worth watching, there may still be some intro segment I’d rather save my friends the trouble of skipping.

In the web version of YouTube, you can share a link directly to a particular timestamp. First, pause at the spot you want the other person to start from. Next, click Share, then click on the Start at checkbox. This alters the link you get by clicking Copy. From there, you can paste the link into any app you choose.

I’m not quite sure why this option is unavailable in the phone and tablet versions of YouTube. Presumably it’s because there isn’t much screen space to work with, but that excuse is falling short in an age when even most “small” phones have six-inch screens.