YouTube is testing a new mobile app feature that enables premium customers to zoom in on any video. According to reports, the most recent opt-in experimental feature allows for a pinch-to-zoom motion for movies — and it works in both portrait and full-screen landscape mode.
The zoom function, according to the firm, will stay in testing until September 1st, allowing YouTube roughly a month to collect user input and perfect things before possibly pushing it out more broadly.
Open YouTube’s settings menu, either on your phone or on the website, to activate pinch to zoom. As long as you have a YouTube Premium subscription, there should be a “test new features” option. The zoom capability is currently the sole functionality available for testing. It seems that there is a lag between choosing the test and being able to perform the pinch gesture since we were unable to zoom in closer on any films right away after turning it on. However, once activated, you should be able to zoom in up to 8x.
Zooming in on YouTube material is already possible with different accessibility features on Android and iOS, and it’s clearly quite simple to do so with a desktop browser. It is, however, more convenient to have it as an optional native feature in the mobile app. After originally testing it with premium users, YouTube eventually released picture-in-picture mode for iPhone and iPad last month; that really helpful feature has long been accessible on Android.
