Over the years The YouTube interface, both in the browser version and in the Android and iOS applications, has undergone more than remarkable development. As always happens in these cases, when we have observed the changes progressively, it may give the impression that it was not so much, but if we exercise our memory, we will find that the jump was more than considerable.

Some changes that also affected their “guts” (remember it was based on Flash for many years). If you don’t remember, or didn’t experience it at the time, here’s an image that shows what YouTube’s home page looked like in 2005. Unfortunately, Archive.org doesn’t keep video thumbnails, but it’s still useful to get a pretty concrete idea and, above all, to compare with its current interface:

Over the years, YouTube has managed to become a reference service to the point of hosting the birth of a character youtuber, which has proven to be so successful over the years. Of course, staying in the top position is not easyand it is even more complicated if the evolution of the market and its users is added to the competition in your particular field of activity, as we have experienced in recent years when we have seen how many content creators have switched from uploading videos to broadcasting directly through another platform. Quite a difficult challenge.

And it gets even more complicated when we talk about the need to monetize the service. As we told you a few days ago, the company decided to raise the price of YouTube Premium in some countries after considering (and later ruling out) restricting 4K content to paid accounts. In the classic carrot and stick analogy, some sticks have been added so it was necessary for the company to offer some carrots soon.

And as we can read on his blog, it happened. and YouTube has given its interface a nice facelift, adding some very interesting new features and also, it seems, will reach all users of the service, not just YouTube Premium users.

The most interesting news is that Apps for Android and iOS will finally allow you to “pinch” to zoom in on videos. This feature has been requested for years by many users who have been using it on their photos for over a decade. If we zoom in this way, we won’t have to hold our hand on the screen for it to hold. We can remove it and the part of the video we zoomed in on will still be displayed.

Another feature that significantly improves search, with an exact search mode available on both devices and desktops. With it, we will only have to drag or slide the playback bar up to display a series of fine-tuned thumbnails, allowing us to move to the exact moment of the video we want.

Another very interesting novelty that I actually want to try is ambient mode. When this is activated, it creates a dynamic sampling of the content that is displayed in the video and automatically applies a subtle color correction to the interface so that it dynamically adapts to the video content that is displayed. Something reminiscent of Philips Ambilight technology, only without leaving the device.

On the other hand, YouTube also claims to have improved its dark modewhat time is it”even darker‘, which will provide more contrast to both the video and interface elements that should stand out.

There have also been changes to the way common interface elements are displayed, from links in video descriptions that will now appear as buttons, to controls for frequent actions (Like, Share, etc.) that have been redesigned to reduce their visual impact and therefore do not reduce the focus of the video.

Although all of these updates were announced today, their rollout will be progressive, so it’s possible that this will be the case we have to wait a few more days, maybe even a week to start enjoying them. However, and given the absence of trying them out, it seems on paper that the wait will be worth it.