Over the past years, YouTube has become a prominent source of content intake on the interwebs. Most users, like us, who’re glued to the platform and binge watch videos on the daily realized the lack of one feature that can further their experience. And well, the company has also realized their pain and given them a double tap-based forward and rewind gesture to skip parts of the video or rewatch them.
The rumor mill had been buzzing about the existence of this feature in the YouTube mobile application for the last couple of days. It was first spotted by The Next Web but it was most likely a server-side update which had been rolled out to a handful of users. Since then, more users started seeing the feature pop up in their mobile app. And some even thought it was magical as they couldn’t figure out how it worked at that instant.
To fast forward or rewind, you just need to double-tap on the right or left-hand side of the video player screen respectively. This enables you to jump 10 seconds forward or back while viewing the video. A double arrow appears on either side when you tap on the video to quick seek the content playing on the screen.
You will need to update your YouTube app to the latest version to witness the feature in action and it doesn’t only work in full-screen mode, as has been mentioned by some early testers. This fast forward and rewind feature has been officially added to the YouTube mobile app just today. But Google, who owns YouTube, didn’t make a formal announcement for the addition of this nifty feature on both iOS and Android. It just updated the ‘What’s New’ section on the Play Store to make users aware of the changes. It reads:
Easily rewind or skip forwards 10 seconds by double-tapping on the left and right sides of the video player.
In addition, YouTube has recently been making numerous changes to its platform to stay ahead of a looming competitor — Facebook. It has recently debuted an in-app messaging feature for users in Canada. This enables you to share messages while watching some piece of content with each other over the app itself, without having to go elsewhere. It is an add-on to the previously introduced community tab that provided creators with an exclusive avenue to connect with their audiences.
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