It's a new year and evidently that means time for the YouTube app to get a new major version number. Yes, it was exactly one year earlier that it jumped from v6 to v10, and yesterday it climbed to v11. So far, it looks like there's not much to commemorate the jump, but the changelog is not completely empty. The subscription feed finally shows markers for videos you've watched, and there are now a few subtle tweaks to the interface that shouldn't go unmentioned.

What's New

Left: old version. Right: new version.

There's a great little feature in YouTube that displays flags in the top-left corner of videos you've viewed. It's just a small black box with the word "WATCHED" in capital letters. There are a couple of screens where these flags are intentionally not shown, but they can be found almost everywhere. Oddly, there was one place where they couldn't be seen: the Subscriptions tab. Since this screen should contain nothing but videos from your favorite content producers, it only makes sense that you would want to keep track of what you've watched. The latest version bump finally brings the Subscriptions tab in line with the rest of the app and properly marks watched videos—that is, when it's working... The watched flag is still inexplicably unreliable, so it won't always show up and can sometimes disappear from videos, but at least it has a chance of showing up now.

One other subtle change was made to the Subscriptions tab (and possibly a couple of other screens) so that it now keeps your scroll position after an orientation change. Rotating between landscape and portrait should no longer send you back to the top of the list.

If you're more interested in visual changes, YouTube is almost always in a state of flux with tiny changes occurring with almost every release. For this update, the overflow menu, search, and Google Cast buttons received a striking color shift. They've gone from black to white, matching the colors of the title text and currently selected tab.

There's also a new color for the loading spinner, which has gone from gray to blue.

Like so many updates from the last week, this one seems pretty light on user-facing changes and instead focused on bug fixes and cleanup. We're still looking for changes, so let us know if anything else turns up.

Download

The APK is signed by Google and upgrades your existing app. The cryptographic signature guarantees that the file is safe to install and was not tampered with in any way. Rather than wait for Google to push this download to your devices, which can take days, download and install it just like any other APK.

Version: 11.01.53 (110153640)

At the time of this post, only the arm64 version is available, but keep checking back on APK Mirror to get the latest versions when they come out.

Thanks, Kwetsima Maluleke. Good eye.