A new “Activity” tab started showing up in the latest stable version of the YouTube Android app, with the addition seemingly being identical to the one which debuted on iOS earlier this year. The Activity section is meant to serve as a synthesis of the old Shared tab and your regular notifications, providing you with a single panel which serves as a more social take on the popular online video service. Users who avoided the Shared tab in the past may not find the new functionality to be particularly useful but are still likely to welcome the change due to the fact that it removes one shortcut they never used from the bottom navigation bar of the app and joins it with a somewhat more prevalent feature in the form of the old notification tab.
The tab is positioned between the Subscriptions and Library items on the navigation bar and reportedly still isn’t live in all parts of the world; users in the United States have yet to confirm seeing the addition but many people from Europe and India have apparently already been able to access it. The rollout itself originally started at least two weeks ago and affects all newer stable versions of the YouTube Android app but it’s presently unclear how long Google will take to complete it. While the company often runs server-side tests in YouTube, the Activity tab doesn’t seem to be an experimental feature given the sheer number of reports of it being live; if Google was simply toying with a new idea here, it probably wouldn’t have distributed it throughout several continents. Likewise, the existence of a virtually identical feature on iOS is yet another hint that the Activity tab is here to stay.
Users who still aren’t able to see the new section and want to access it as soon as possible for any reason may try clearing the app’s cache, though there’s a low chance such a move will prompt the redesign to appear. While the Activity tab seems to be appearing in several versions of YouTube for Android, downloading the latest one certainly won’t lower your chances of getting the new feature.
