Vertical videos are terrible for many reasons, but we may have to come to terms with the fact that people just won't stop recording videos vertically. This inescapable foible of humanity is made slightly less galling by a new feature in YouTube 10.28 (which you can grab from APK Mirror). Vertical videos are now displayed properly (i.e. vertically) when made full screen - something we didn't quite notice until today.

The old behavior for a vertical video was to make the video "full screen" by simply displaying it up and down in landscape mode (you couldn't rotate). That makes it barely larger than the non-full screen view. As of the latest version, you will get the vertical video in true full screen with a vertical orientation on your device. You can test it on your phone or tablet with this video.

How it used to be

As you can see above, this behavior was not present in YouTube 10.25. Even Google's best efforts to make people stop recording vertical videos have failed, so let's at least take solace in this long overdue change. Oh, and Reddit should be ecstatic - the timing is just perfect.