Both widgets are styled around Google’s Material You — an auto theme-ing solution, which aims to make your home screen stylish and clean. The widgets themselves present users with several shortcuts to specific YouTube functions or categories.
As of now, there are two widgets to choose from. One of them is more minimal, offering a direct YouTube search. That could potentially save you a tap or so, when compared to searching via the Google bar, as that covers the general web, instead of a specific app.
The second widget is admittedly more robust, as it offers not only the ability to search YouTube directly, which can take you to your favorite part of the app, such as your list of Subscriptions or your Library.
The amount of buttons present depends on how wide the widget is horizontally. And that really highlights the missed opportunity to have the search bar disappear when you shorten the widget. Including the bar on both widgets makes it a bit redundant, given that it’s already available separately. Oh well!
The new YouTube widgets, customized automatically through Material You.
- Holding a finger on your home screen
- Entering the Widgets menu
- Scroll towards the bottom of the list, where the YouTube widgets are
If you aren’t seeing them yet, take a moment to check if you might have any pending updates, both regarding your system and the YouTube app specifically, and then try again.
It’s always great to have more customization options, especially in an age when we almost never see widgets get released. Google seems to be sticking to its Material You design agenda, so we hope that we will see more widgets from other apps soon.
