Here’s an early look at YouTube Music’s upcoming Material You widget [Gallery]

Abner Li | Sep 10 2021 - 2:32 pm PT

Android 12 brings a renewed focus on widgets with Google Photos and Clock — just this week — serving as key examples. YouTube Music is working on a Material You widget, and we’ve enabled a preview of it.

About APK Insight: In this “APK Insight” post, we’ve decompiled the latest version of an application that Google uploaded to the Play Store. When we decompile these files (called APKs, in the case of Android apps), we’re able to see various lines of code within that hint at possible future features. Keep in mind that Google may or may not ever ship these features, and our interpretation of what they are may be imperfect. We’ll try to enable those that are closer to being finished, however, to show you how they’ll look in the case that they do ship. With that in mind, read on.

Back at I/O, Google showed a Material You video reel that highlighted what redesigned apps and widgets could look like. There was clearly one for a music player that we now know is for YouTube Music.

This upcoming Material You YouTube Music widget is quite large at 3×3. It can be made bigger, but not any smaller. The circle, which shows the app’s logo when there’s nothing playing, is accompanied by two buttons. You have play/pause in the bottom-left corner, while a thumbs-up for liking the current track is opposite that.

The latter is housed in a rounded square, while the other button is circular with Dynamic Color, theming them separately based on your wallpaper. It would also make sense to hue those controls based on album art.

A tap anywhere else will presumably open YouTube Music to Now Playing. These screenshots are the extent of what we managed to enable today, so it’s unclear if artwork will spin like in the design video or remain still.

Meanwhile, there could be more changes before launch. The biggest obstacle right now is the size and the fact that it takes up most of your homescreen. It would be wise for YouTube Music to also modernize the current 4×1 widget, which maxes out at 5×2 today, to offer users something more conventional with Material You. A possible preview of that can be seen in this week’s Pixel 6 ad.