If you are currently watching a video on YouTube and want to jump into the next video seamlessly, your current options are creating a playlist or adding the video to the watch later tab. However, this does not give you as much flexibility, similar to what music players have with their ability to queue titles and play them in whatever order that you want. Google is looking to fix this.
The new “Add to queue” functionality is already live on the web version of YouTube, and it is now entering testing for the Android and iOS apps. Unlike the Watch Later or Creating a playlist options which are more permanent, and you will have to manually clear them later when you are done with the videos you are interested in, Add to Queue is temporary and once closed your queue will be deleted automatically.
Being temporary makes Add to Queue suitable for queueing a bunch of videos you want to watch once and then moving on to other things. Once the feature is live on your Android phone, the three-dot overflow menu that appears next to videos will have a new option which reads, “Play last in queue” meaning the video that you added first will also be played first, unless you shuffle the order which you can do by dragging the title of the video to whatever position that you want in the queue.
Once you have created a queue, you can remove a video that you do not want in it by swiping it left. There are also options to repeat and shuffle playback. Swiping away the whole queue as well as closing the mini-player will delete it.
Interestingly, YouTube queue is currently only available to YouTube Premium subscribers on Android and iOS, however, it is available to all users on the desktop version.
If you have Premium, open the YouTube app and tap your profile avatar in the top right corner. Head to settings, then choose new features. Once you have enabled it, it will take a few minutes to load the feature.
YouTube queue is currently marked for testing until January 28, once it comes out of this period, it will likely be rolled out to all users both premium subscribers and those on the free version.
