Social media giant, Facebook, has been constantly upgrading its mobile app to better serve its users. Updates to the app in the past few months include a major update which allowed its users to live stream videos directly from the mobile app, to allowing its users to upload videos in the comments section of Facebook postings. Currently, the social media network is testing out a new feature, one which some users will be happy to know about, while others might dread it. Facebook is currently testing out an auto-play audio feature on its mobile apps, which will work alongside its already available auto-play video feature.
According to the social media giant, its social media platform has seen a 66 percent rise in the average daily video views per user. However, half of that time spent watching videos is spent viewing the said content with the audio turned off. Due to that, Facebook has begun testing the auto-play audio feature on its mobile apps just to see if its user base will enjoy and be acceptable towards it. The company is monitoring feedback from its users very closely for now so if the new feature doesn’t receive approval from its users, the feature might not be able to take off on all its platforms after all.
How the new auto-play audio feature will work? Just like the auto-play video feature, the audio will automatically play alongside the video when you scroll to a video on your News Feed. The video and audio will automatically stop playing if you scroll past it. Don’t like the new feature or your feed is filled with content that is Not Safe For Work (NSFW) from your friends? You can disable the new feature in settings of the mobile app itself or you can opt to toggle off the sound on individual videos themselves. Do take note that so far, this feature is only available on Facebook’s mobile apps, meaning when you browse Facebook on a web browser, the auto-play audio feature will not function. At the moment, Facebook has over one billion downloads on the Google Play Store alone.